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Glen DESSERAY andotherpoems,
by J. C. Shairp, late Principal of the United College,
S. Andrews, and Professor of Poetry in the University
of Oxford. With Essay and Notes. 8vo.

Messrs. MACMILLAN, Bedford St., Covent Garden

* * * * *

To be published presently

Thetreasuryofsacredsong,
selected from the English Lyrical Poetry of
Four Centuries, with Notes Explanatory and Biographical

Clarendonpress, OxfordAug. 1889

INTRODUCTION.

Again, on behalf of readers of this nationallibrary, I have to thank a poet of our day—­in
this case the Oxford Professor of Poetry—­for
joining his voice to the voices of the past through
which our better life is quickened for the duties
of to-day. Not for his own verse only, but for
his fine sense also of what is truest in the poets
who have gone before, the name of Francis Turner Palgrave
is familiar to us all. Many a home has been
made the richer for his gathering of voices of the
past into a dainty “Golden Treasury of English
Songs.” Of this work of his own I may
cite what was said of it in Macmillan’s Magazine
for October, 1882, by a writer of high authority in
English Literature, Professor A. W. Ward, of Owens
College. “A very eminent authority,”
said Professor Ward, “has accorded to Mr. Palgrave’s
historical insight, praise by the side of which all
words of mine must be valueless,” Canon [now
Bishop] Stubbs writes:—­“I do not
think that there is one of the Visions which
does not carry my thorough consent and sympathy all
through.”

Page 2

Here, then, Mr. Palgrave re-issues, for the help of
many thousands more, his own songs of the memories
of the Nation, addressed to a Nation that has not
yet forfeited the praise of Milton. Milton said
of the Englishman, “If we look at his native
towardliness in the roughcast, without breeding, some
nation or other may haply be better composed to a
natural civility and right judgment than he.
But if he get the benefit once of a wise and well-rectified
nurture, I suppose that wherever mention is made of
countries, manners, or men, the English people, among
the first that shall be praised, may deserve to be
accounted a right pious, right honest, and right hardy
nation.” So much is shown by the various
utterances in this nationallibrary.
So much is shown, in the present volume of it, by
a poet’s vision of the England that has been
till now, and is what she has been.

PREFACE

As the scheme which the Author has here endeavoured
to execute has not, so far as he knows, the advantage
of any near precedent in any literature, he hopes
that a few explanatory words may be offered without
incurring censure for egotism.

Our history is so eminently rich and varied, and at
the same time, by the fact of our insular position,
so stamped with unity, that from days very remote
it has supplied matter for song. This, among
Celts and Angles, at first was lyrical. But
poetry, for many centuries after the Conquest, mainly
took the annalistic form, and, despite the ability
often shown, was hence predoomed to failure.
For a nation’s history cannot but present many
dull or confused periods, many men and things intractable
by poetry, though, perhaps, politically effective
and important, which cannot be excluded from any narrative
aiming at consecutiveness; and, by the natural laws
of art, these passages, when rendered in verse, in
their effect become more prosaic than they would be
in a prose rendering.

Page 3

My attempt has therefore been to revert to the earlier
and more natural conditions of poetry, and to offer,—­not
a continuous narrative; not poems on every critical
moment or conspicuous man in our long annals,—­but
single lyrical pictures of such leading or typical
characters and scenes in English history, and only
such, as have seemed amenable to a strictly poetical
treatment. Poetry, not History, has, hence, been
my first and last aim; or, perhaps I might define
it, History for Poetry’s sake. At the
same time, I have striven to keep throughout as closely
to absolute historical truth in the design and colouring
of the pieces as the exigencies of poetry permit:—­the
result aimed at being to unite the actual tone and
spirit of the time concerned, with the best estimate
which has been reached by the research and genius of
modern investigators. Our island story, freed
from the ’falsehood of extremes,’—­exorcised,
above all, from the seducing demon of party-spirit,
I have thus here done my best to set forth. And
as this line of endeavour has conducted and constrained
me, especially when the seventeenth century is concerned,
to judgments—­supported indeed by historians
conspicuous for research, ability, and fairness, but
often remote from the views popularized by the writers
of our own day,—­upon these points a few
justificatory notes have been added.

A double aim has hence governed and limited both the
selection and the treatment of my subjects.
The choice has necessarily fallen, often, not on simply
picturesque incident or unfamiliar character, but on
the men and things that we think of first, when thinking
of the long chronicle of England,—­or upon
such as represent and symbolize the main current of
it. Themes, however, on which able or popular
song is already extant,—­notably in case
of Scotland,—­I have in general avoided.
In the rendering, my desire has been always to rest
the poetry of each Vision on its own intrinsic interest;
to write with a straightforward eye to the object
alone; not studious of ornament for ornament’s
sake; allowing the least possible overt intrusion
of the writer’s personality; and, in accordance
with lyrical law, seeking, as a rule, to fix upon some
factual picture for each poem.

* * * * *

To define, thus, the scope of what this book attempts,
is, in itself, a confession of presumptuousness,—­the
writer’s own sense of which is but feebly and
imperfectly expressed in the words from Vergil’s
letter to Augustus prefixed as my motto. In
truth, so rich and so wide are the materials, that
to scheme a lyrical series which should really paint
the Gesta Anglorum in their fulness might almost
argue ‘lack of wit,’ vitium mentis,
in much greater powers than mine. No criticism,
however severe, can add to my own consciousness how
far the execution of the work, in regard to each of
its aims, falls below the plan. Yet I would
allow myself the hope, great as the deficiencies may

Page 4

be, that the love of truth and the love of England
are mine by inheritance in a degree sufficient to
exempt this book, (the labour of several years), from
infidelity to either:—­that the intrinsic
worth and weight of my subject may commend these songs,
both at home, and in the many Englands beyond sea,
to those who, (despite the inevitably more engrossing
attractions of the Present, and the emphatic bias
of modern culture towards the immediate and the tangible),
maintain that high and soul-inspiring interest which,
identifying us with our magnificent Past, and all its
varied lessons of defeat and victory, offers at the
same time,—­under the guidance from above,—­our
sole secure guarantee for prosperous and healthy progress
in the Future.

The world has cycles in its course,
when all
That once has been, is acted o’er
again;

and only the nation which, at each moment of political
or social evolution, looks lovingly backward to its
own painfully-earned experience—­Respiciens,
Prospiciens, as Tennyson’s own chosen
device expresses it—­has solid reason to
hope, that its movement is true Advance—­that
its course is Upward.

* * * * *

It remains only to add, that the book has been carefully
revised and corrected, and that nineteen pieces published
in the original volume of 1881 are not reprinted in
the present issue.

F. T. P.July, 1889

THE VISIONS OF ENGLAND

PRELUDE

CAESAR TO EGBERT

1

England, fair England! Empress
isle of isles!
—­Round whom the loving-envious
ocean plays,
Girdling thy feet with silver and
with smiles,
Whilst all the nations crowd thy
liberal bays;
With rushing wheel and heart of
fire they come,
Or glide and glance like white-wing’d
doves that know
And seek their
proper home:—­
England! not England yet! but fair
as now,
When first the chalky strand was stirr’d by
Roman prow.

2

On thy dear countenance, great mother-land,
Age after age thy sons have set
their sign,
Moulding the features with successive
hand
Not always sedulous of beauty’s
line:—­
Yet here Man’s art in one
harmonious aim
With Nature’s gentle moulding,
oft has work’d
The perfect whole
to frame:
Nor does earth’s labour’d
face elsewhere, like thee,
Give back her children’s heart with such full
sympathy

Page 5

4

—­Another age!—­The
spell of Rome has past
Transforming all our Britain; Ruthless
plough,
Which plough’d the world,
yet o’er the nations cast
The seed of arts, and law, and all
that now
Has ripen’d into commonwealths:—­Her
hand
With network mile-paths binding
plain and hill
Arterialized the
land:
The thicket yields: the soil
for use is clear;
Peace with her plastic touch,—­field, farm,
and grange are here.

5

Lo, flintwall’d cities, castles
stark and square
Bastion’d with rocks that
rival Nature’s own;
Red-furnaced baths, trim gardens
planted fair
With tree and flower the North ne’er
yet had known;
Long temple-roofs and statues poised
on high
With golden wings outstretch’d
for tiptoe flight,
Quivering in summer
sky:—­
The land had rest, while those stern
legions lay
By northern ramparts camp’d, and held the Pict
at bay.

And Thou—­O whether born
of flame and wave,
Or Gorlois’ son, or Uther’s,
blameless lord,
True knight, who died for those
thou couldst not save
When the Round Table brake their
plighted word,—­
The lord of song hath set thee in
thy grace
And glory, rescued from the phantom
world,
Before us face
to face;
No more Avilion bowers the King
detain;
The mystic child returns; the Arthur reigns again!

8

—­Now, as some cloud that
hides a mountain bulk
Thins to white smoke, and mounts
in lighten’d air,
And through the veil the gray enormous
hulk
Burns, and the summit, last, is
keen and bare,—­
From wasted Britain so the gloaming
clears;
Another birth of time breaks eager
out,
And England fair
appears:—­
Imperial youth sign’d on her
golden brow,
While the prophetic eyes with hope and promise glow.

9

Then from the wasted places of the
land,
Charr’d skeletons of cities,
circling walls
Of Roman might, and towers that
shatter’d stand
Of that lost world survivors, forth
she calls
Her new creation:—­O’er
the land is wrought
The happy villagedom by English
tribes
From Elbe and
Baltic brought;
Red kine light up with life the
ravaged plain;
The forest glooms are pierced; the plough-land laughs
again.

10

Page 6

Each from its little croft the homesteads
peep,
Green apple-garths around, and hedgeless
meads,
Smooth-shaven lawns of ever-shifting
sheep,
Wolds where his dappled crew the
swineherd feeds:—­
Pale gold round pure pale foreheads,
and their eyes
More dewy blue than speedwell by
the brook
When Spring’s
fresh current flies,
The free fair maids come barefoot
to the fount,
Or poppy-crown’d with fire, the car of harvest
mount.

11

On the salt stream that rings us,
ness and bay,
The nation’s old sea-soul
beats blithe and strong;
The black foam-breasters taste Biscayan
spray,
And where ’neath Polar dawns
the narwhals throng:—­
Free hands, free hearts, for labour
and for glee,
Or village-moot, when thane with
churl unites
Beneath the sacred
tree;
While wisdom tempers force, and
bravery leads,
Till spears beat Aye! on shields, and words
at once are deeds.

12

Again with life the ruin’d
cities smile,
Again from mother-Rome their sacred
fire
Knowledge and Faith rekindle through
the isle,
Nigh quench’d by barbarous
war and heathen ire:—­
—­No more on Balder’s
grave let Anglia weep
When winter storms entomb the golden
year
Sunk in Adonis-sleep;
Another God has risen, and not in
vain!
The Woden-ash is low, the Cross asserts her reign.

13

—­Land of the most law-loving,—­the
most free!
My dear, dear England! sweet and
green as now
The flower-illumined garden of the
sea,
And Nature least impair’d
by axe and plough!
A laughing land!—­Thou
seest not in the north
How the black Dane and vulture Norseman
wait
The sign of coming
forth,
The foul Landeyda flap its raven
plume,
And all the realms once more eclipsed in pagan gloom!

14

—­O race, of many races
well compact!
As some rich stream that runs in
silver down
From the White Mount:—­his
baby steps untrack’d
Where clouds and emerald cliffs
of crystal frown;
Now, alien founts bring tributary
flood,
Or kindred waters blend their native
hue,
Some darkening
as with blood;
These fraught with iron strength
and freshening brine,
And these with lustral waves, to sweeten and refine.

15

Now calm as strong, and clear as
summer air,
Blessing and blest of earth and
sky, he glides:
Now on some rock-ridge rends his
bosom fair,
And foams with cloudy wrath and
hissing tides:
Then with full flood of level-gliding
force,
His discord-blended melody murmurs
low
Down the long
seaward course:—­
So through Time’s mead, great
River, greatly glide:
Whither, thou may’st not know:—­but
He, who knows, will guide.

Page 7

St. 3 Sketches Prehistoric England. St. 4 Mile-paths;
old English name for Roman roads. St. 5 Tree
and flower; such are reported to have been naturalized
in England by the Romans.—­Northern ramparts;
that of Agricola and Lollius Urbicus from Forth to
Clyde, and the greater work of Hadrian and Severus
between Tyne and Solway. St. 6, 7 The Arthurian
legends,—­now revivified for us by Tennyson’s
magnificent Idylls of the King,—­form
the visionary links in our history between the decline
of the Roman power and the earlier days of the Saxon
conquest. St. 9 Villagedom; Angles and
Saxons seem at first to have burned the larger towns
of the Romanized Britons and left them deserted, in
favour of village-life. St. 11 Village-moot:
Held on a little hill or round a sacred tree:
’the ealdermen spoke, groups of freemen stood
round, clashing shields in applause, settling matters
by loud shouts of Aye or Nay.’
(J. R. Green, History of the English People).
St. 12 Balder, the God of Light, like Adonis in the
old Greek story, is a nature-myth, figuring the Sun,
yearly dying in winter, and yearly restored to life.
St. 13 Landeyda; Name of Danish banner:
‘the desolation of the land.’

For further details upon points briefly noticed in
this Prelude, readers are referred to Mr. J.
R. Green’s History, and to Mr. T. Wright’s
The Celt, The Roman, and The Saxon,
as sources readily accessible.

As though his heavy chariot-wheels went round:
Nor is there other sound
Save from the abyss of air, a plaintive note,
The seabirds’ calling cry,
As ’gainst the wind with well-poised weight
they float,

Or on some white-fringed reef set up their post,
And sentinel the coast:—­
Whilst, round each jutting cape, in pillar’d
file,
The lichen-bearded rocks
Like hoary giants guard the sacred Isle.

—­Happy, alone with Nature thus!—­Yet
here
Dim, primal man is near;—­
The hawk-eyed eager traders, who of yore
Through long Biscayan waves
Star-steer’d adventurous from the Iberic shore

Or the Sidonian, with their fragrant freight
Oil-olive, fig, and date;
Jars of dark sunburnt wine, flax-woven robes,
Or Tyrian azure glass
Wavy with gold, and agate-banded globes:—­

Changing for amber-knobs their Eastern ware
Or tin-sand silvery fair,
To temper brazen swords, or rim the shield
Of heroes, arm’d for fight:—­
While the rough miners, wondering, gladly yield

Page 8

The treasured ore; nor Alexander’s name
Know, nor fair Helen’s shame;
Or in his tent how Peleus’ wrathful son
Looks toward the sea, nor heeds
The towers of still-unconquer’d Ilion.

Belerium; The name given to the Land’s
End by Diodorus, the Greek historical compiler.
He describes the natives as hospitable and civilized.
They mined tin, which was bought by traders and carried
through Gaul to the south-east, and may, as suggested
here, have been used in their armour by the warriors
during the Homeric Siege of Troy.

Again the gaunt Paulinus
To ruddy Edwin spake:
’God offers life immortal
For His dear Son’s own sake!
Wilt thou not hear his message
Who bears the Keys and Sword?’
—­But Edwin look’d and ponder’d,
And answer’d not a word.

Rose then a sage old warrior;
Was five-score winters old;
Whose beard from chin to girdle
Like one long snow-wreath roll’d:—­
’At Yule-time in our chamber
We sit in warmth and light,
While cavern-black around us
Lies the grim mouth of Night.

’Athwart the room a sparrow
Darts from the open door:
Within the happy hearth-light
One red flash,—­and no
more!
We see it born from darkness,
And into darkness go:—­
So is our life, King Edwin!
Ah, that it should be so!

’But if this pale Paulinus
Have somewhat more to tell;
Some news of whence and whither,
And where the Soul may dwell:—­
If on that outer darkness
The sun of Hope may shine;—­
He makes life worth the living!
I take his God for mine!’

So spake the wise old warrior;
And all about him cried
‘Paulinus’ God hath conquer’d!
And he shall he our guide:—­
For he makes life worth living,
Who brings this message plain,—­
When our brief days are over,
That we shall live again.’

Paulinus was one of the four missionaries sent form
Rome by Gregory the Great in 601. The marriage
of Edwin, King of Northumbria, with Ethelburga, sister
to Eadbald of Kent, opened Paulinus’ way to northern
England. Bede, born less than fifty years after,
has given an admirable narrative of Edwin’s
conversion: which is very completely told in
Bright’s Early English Church History,
B. IV.

Deira, (from old-Welsh deifr, waters), then
comprised Eastern Yorkshire from Tees to Humber.
Goodmanham, where the meeting described was held,
is some 23 miles from York.

ALFRED THE GREAT

Page 9

849-901

1

The fair-hair’d boy is at his mother’s
knee,
A many-colour’d page before
them spread,
Gay summer harvest-field of gold
and red,
With lines and staves of ancient minstrelsy.
But through her eyes alone the child can see,
From her sweet lips partake the
words of song,
And looks as one who feels a hidden
wrong,
Or gazes on some feat of gramarye.
‘When thou canst use it, thine the book!’
she cried:
He blush’d, and clasp’d it to his breast
with pride:—­
‘Unkingly task!’ his
comrades cry; In vain;
All work ennobles nobleness, all art,
He sees; Head governs hand; and in his heart
All knowledge for his province he
has ta’en.

2

Few the bright days, and brief the fruitful rest,
As summer-clouds that o’er
the valley flit:—­
To other tasks his genius he must
fit;
The Dane is in the land, uneasy guest!
—­O sacred Athelney, from pagan quest
Secure, sole haven for the faithful
boy
Waiting God’s issue with heroic
joy
And unrelaxing purpose in the breast!
The Dragon and the Raven, inch by inch,
For England fight; nor Dane nor Saxon flinch;
Then Alfred strikes his blow; the
realm is free:—­
He, changing at the font his foe to friend,
Yields for the time, to gain the far-off end,
By moderation doubling victory.

O much-vex’d life, for us too short, too dear!
The laggard body lame behind the
soul;
Pain, that ne’er marr’d
the mind’s serene control;
Breathing on earth heaven’s aether atmosphere,
God with thee, and the love that casts out fear!
A soul in life’s salt ocean
guarding sure
The freshness of youth’s fountain
sweet and pure,
And to all natural impulse crystal-clear:
To service or command, to low and high
Equal at once in magnanimity,
The Great by right divine thou only
art!
Fair star, that crowns the front of England’s
morn,
Royal with Nature’s royalty inborn,
And English to the very heart of
heart!

The fair-hair’d boy: There is a
singular unanimity among historians in regard to this
‘darling of the English,’ whose life has
been vividly sketched by Freeman (Conquest,
ch. ii); by Green (English People, B. I:
ch. iii); and, earlier, by my Father in his short History
of the Anglo-Saxons, ch. vi-viii.

Changing at the font: Alfred was godfather
to Guthrun the Dane, when baptized after his defeat
at Ethandune in 878.

A DANISH BARROW

ON THE EAST DEVON COAST

Lie still, old Dane, below thy heap!
—­A sturdy-back and sturdy-limb,
Whoe’er he was, I warrant
him
Upon whose mound the single sheep
Browses and tinkles in the sun,
Within the narrow vale alone.

Page 10

Lie still!—­Thy mother-land herself
Would know thee not again:
no more
The Raven from the northern shore
Hails the bold crew to push for pelf,
Through fire and blood and slaughter’d
kings,
’Neath the black terror of
his wings.

And thou,—­thy very name is lost!
The peasant only knows that here
Bold Alfred scoop’d thy flinty
bier,
And pray’d a foeman’s prayer, and tost
His auburn, head, and said ’One
more
Of England’s foes guards England’s
shore,’

And turn’d and pass’d to other feats,
And left thee in thine iron robe,
To circle with the circling globe,
While Time’s corrosive dewdrop eats
The giant warrior to a crust
Of earth in earth, and rust in rust.

So lie: and let the children play
And sit like flowers upon thy grave,
And crown with flowers,—­that
hardly have
A briefer blooming-tide than they;—­
By hurrying years borne on to rest,
As thou, within the Mother’s
breast.

HASTINGS

October 14: 1066

’Gyrth, is it dawn in the sky that I see? or
is all the sky blood?
Heavy and sore was the fight in the North: yet
we fought for the good.
O but—­Brother ’gainst brother!—­’twas
hard!—­Now I come with a will
To baste the false bastard of France, the hide of
the tanyard and mill!
Now on the razor-edge lies
England the priceless, the prize!
God aiding, the Raven at Stamford we smote;
One stroke more for the land here I strike and devote!’

Red with fresh breath on her lips came the dawn; and
Harold uprose;
Kneels as man before God; then takes his long pole-axe,
and goes
Where round their woven wall, tough ash-palisado,
they crowd;
Mightily cleaves and binds, to his comrades crying
aloud
’Englishmen stalwart and true,
But one word has Harold for you!
When from the field the false foreigners run,
Stand firm in your castle, and all will be won!

’Now, with God o’er us, and Holy Rood,
arm!’—­And he ran for his spear:
But Gyrth held him back, ’mong his brothers
Gyrth the most honour’d, most
dear:
’Go not, Harold! thine oath is against thee!
the Saints look askance:
I am not king; let me lead them, me only: mine
be the chance!’
—­’No! The
leader must lead!
Better that Harold should bleed!
To the souls I appeal, not the dust of the tomb:—­
King chosen of Edward and England, I come!’

Over Heathland surge banners and lances, three armies;
William the last,
Clenching his mace; Rome’s gonfanon round him
Rome’s majesty cast:
O’er his Bretons Fergant, o’er the hireling
squadrons Montgomery lords,
Jerkin’d archers, and mail-clads, and horsemen
with pennons and swords:—­
—­England, in threefold
array,
Anchor, and hold them at bay,
Firm set in your own wooden walls! and the wave
Of high-crested Frenchmen will break on their grave.

Page 11

So to the palisade on! There, Harold and Leofwine
and Gyrth
Stand like a triple Thor, true brethren in arms as
in birth:
And above the fierce standards strain at their poles
as they flare on the
gale;
One, the old Dragon of Wessex, and one, a Warrior
in mail.
‘God Almighty!’ they
cry!
‘Haro!’ the Northmen
reply:—­
As when eagles are gather’d and loud o’er
the prey,
Shout! for ’tis England the prize of the fray!

And as when two lightning-clouds tilt, between them
an arrowy sleet
Hisses and darts; till the challenging thunders are
heard, and they meet;
Across fly javelins and serpents of flame: green
earth and blue sky
Blurr’d in the blind tornado:—­so
now the battle goes high.
Shearing through helmet and limb
Glaive-steel and battle-axe grim:
As the flash of the reaper in summer’s high
wheat,
King Harold mows horseman and horse at his feet.

O vainly the whirlwind of France up the turf to the
palisade swept:
Shoulder to shoulder the Englishmen stand, and the
shield-wall is kept:—­
As, in a summer to be, when England and she yet again
Strove for the sovranty, firm stood our squares, through
the pitiless
rain
Death rain’d o’er them
all day;
—­Happier, not braver
than they
Who on Senlac e’en yet their still garrison
keep,
Sleeping a long Marathonian sleep!

‘Madmen, why turn?’ cried the Duke,—­for
the horsemen recoil from the
slope;
’Behold me! I live!’—­and
he lifted the ventayle; ’before you is hope:
Death, not safety, behind!’—­and he
spurs to the centre once more,
Lion-like leaps on the standard and Harold: but
Gyrth is before!
‘Down! He is down!’
is the shout:
‘On with the axes! Out,
Out!’
—­He rises again; the mace circles its stroke;
Then falls as the thunderbolt falls on the oak.

—­Gyrth is crush’d, and Leofwine is
crush’d; yet the shields hold their
wall:
’Edith alone of my dear ones is left me, and
dearest of all!
Edith has said she would seek me to-day when the battle
is done;
Her love more precious alone than kingdoms and victory
won;
O for the sweetness of home!
O for the kindness to come!’
Then around him again the wild war-dragons roar,
And he drinks the red wine-cup of battle once more.

—­’Anyhow from their rampart to lure
them, to shatter the bucklers and
wall,
Acting a flight,’ in his craft thought William,
and sign’d to recall
His left battle:—­O countrymen! slow to
be roused! roused, always, as
then,
Reckless of life or death, bent only to quit you like
men!—­
As bolts from the bow-string they
go,
Whirl them and hurl them below,
Where the deep foss yawns for the foe in his course,
Piled up and brimming with horseman and horse.

Page 12

As when October’s sun, long caught in a curtain
of gray,
With a flood of impatient crimson breaks out, at the
dying of day,
And trees and green fields, the hills and the skies,
are all steep’d in
the stain;—­
So o’er the English one hope flamed forth, one
moment,—­in vain!
As hail when the corn-fields are
deep,
Down the fierce arrow-points sweep:
Now the basnets of France o’er the palisade
frown;
The shield-fort is shatter’d; the Dragon is
down.

O then there was dashing and dinting of axe and of
broad-sword and spear:
Blood crying out to blood: and Hatred that casteth
out fear!
Loud where the fight is the loudest, the slaughter-breath
hot in the air,
O what a cry was that!—­the cry of a nation’s
despair!
—­Hew down the best of
the land!
Down them with mace and with brand!
The fell foreign arrow has crash’d to the brain;
England with Harold the Englishman slain!

Yet they fought on for their England! of ineffaceable
fame
Worthy, and stood to the death, though the greedy
sword, like a flame,
Bit and bit yet again in the solid ranks, and the
dead
Heap where they die, and hills of foemen about them
are spread:—­
—­Hew down the heart of
the land,
There, to a man, where they stand!
Till night with her blackness uncrimsons the stain,
And the merciful shroud overshadows our slain.

Heroes unburied, unwept!—­But a wan gray
thing in the night
Like a marsh-wisp flits to and fro through the blood-lake,
the steam of
the fight;
Turning the bodies, exploring the features with delicate
touch;
Stumbling as one that finds nothing: but now!—­as
one finding too much:
Love through mid-midnight will see:
Edith the fair! It is he!
Clasp him once more, the heroic, the dear!
Harold was England: and Harold lies here.

The hide of the tanyard; See the story of Arlette
or Herleva, the tanner’s daughter, mother to
William ‘the Bastard.’

At Stamford; At Stamford Bridge, over the Derwent,
Harold defeated his brother Tostig and Harold Hardrada,
Sep 25, 1066.

Your castle; Harold’s triple palisade
upon the hill of battle is so described by the chronicler,
Henry of Huntingdon.

Rome’s gonfanon; The consecrated banner,
sent to William from Rome.

The fierce standards; These were planted on
the spot chosen by the Conqueror for the high-altar
of the Abbey of Battle. The Warrior was
Harold’s ‘personal ensign.’

In a summer to be; June 18, 1815.

The ventayle; Used here for the nasale
or nose-piece shown in the Bayeux Tapestry.

DEATH IN THE FOREST

August 2: 1100

Where the greenwood is greenest
At gloaming of day,
Where the twelve-antler’d stag
Faces boldest at bay;
Where the solitude deepens,
Till almost you hear
The blood-beat of the heart
As the quarry slips near;
His comrades outridden
With scorn in the race,
The Red King is hallooing
His bounds to the chase.

Page 13

What though the Wild Hunt
Like a whirlwind of hell
Yestereve ran the forest,
With baying and yell:—­
In his cups the Red heathen
Mocks God to the face;
—­’In the devil’s name, shoot;
Tyrrell, ho!—­to the chase!’

—­Now with worms for his courtiers
He lies in the narrow
Cold couch of the chancel!
—­But whence was the arrow?

The dread vision of Serlo
That call’d him to die,
The weird sacrilege terror
Of sleep, have gone by.
The blood of young Richard
Cries on him in vain,
In the heart of the Lindwood
By arbalest slain.
And he plunges alone
In the Serpent-glade gloom,
As one whom the Furies
Hound headlong to doom.

His sin goes before him,
The lust and the pride;
And the curses of England
Breathe hot at his side.
And the desecrate walls
Of the Evil-wood shrine
Lo, he passes—­unheeding
Dark vision and sign:—­

—­Now with worms for his courtiers
He lies in the narrow
Cold couch of the chancel:
—­But whence was the arrow?

Then a shudder of death
Flicker’d fast through the wood:—­
And they found the Red King
Red-gilt in his blood.
What wells up in his throat?
Is it cursing, or prayer?
Was it Henry, or Tyrrell,
Or demon, who there
Has dyed the fell tyrant
Twice crimson in gore,
While the soul disincarnate
Hunts on to hell-door?

—­Ah! friendless in death!
Rude forest-hands fling
On the charcoaler’s wain
What but now was the king!
And through the long Minster
The carcass they bear,
And huddle it down
Without priest, without prayer:—­

Now with worms for his courtiers
He lies in the narrow
Cold couch of the chancel:
—­But whence was the arrow?

In his cups; Rufus, it is said, was ‘fey,’
as the old phrase has it, on the day of his death.
He feasted long and high, and then chose out two
cross-bow shafts, presenting them to Tyrrell with the
exclamation given above.

Serlo; He was Abbot of Gloucester, and had
sent to Rufus the narrative of an ominous dream, reported
in the Monastery.

The true dreams; On his last night Rufus ’laid
himself down to sleep, but not in peace; the attendants
were startled by the King’s voice—­a
bitter cry—­a cry for help—­a cry
for deliverance—­he had been suddenly awakened
by a dreadful dream, as of exquisite anguish befalling
him in that ruined church, at the foot of the Malwood
rampart.’ Palgrave: Hist. of Normandy
and of England, B. IV: ch. xii.

Young Richard; Son to Robert Courthose, and
hunting, as his uncle’s guest, in the New Forest
in May 1100, was mysteriously slain by a heavy bolt
from a Norman Arbalest.

The Evil-wood walls; ’Amongst the sixty
churches which had been ‘ruined,’ my Father
remarks, in his notice of the New Forest, ’the
sanctuary below the mystic Malwood was peculiarly remarkable.
. . . You reach the Malwood easily from the Leafy
Lodge in the favourite deer-walk, the Lind-hurst,
the Dragon’s wood.’

Page 14

Through the long Minster; Winchester.
Rufus, with much hesitation, was buried in the chancel
as a king; but no religious service or ceremonial
was celebrated:—­’All men thought that
prayers were hopeless.’

EDITH OF ENGLAND

1100

Through sapling shades of summer green,
By glade and height and hollow,
Where Rufus rode the stag to bay,
King Henry spurs a jocund way,
Another chase to follow.
But when he came to Romsey gate
The doors are open’d free,
And through the gate like sunshine streams
A maiden company:—­
One girdled with the vervain-red,
And three in sendal gray,
And touch the trembling rebeck-strings
To their soft roundelay;—­

—­The bravest knight may fail in fight;
The red rust edge the sword;
The king his crown in dust lay down;
But Love is always Lord!

King Henry at her feet flings down,
His helmet ringing loudly:—­
His kisses worship Edith’s hand;
‘Wilt thou be Queen of all the land?’
—­O red she blush’d
and proudly!
Red as the crimson girdle bound
Beneath her gracious breast;
Red as the silken scarf that flames
Above his lion-crest.
She lifts and casts the cloister-veil
All on the cloister-floor:—­
The novice maids of Romsey smile,
And think of love once more.

‘Well, well, to blush!’ the Abbess cried,
’The veil and vow deriding
That rescued thee, in baby days,
From insolence of Norman gaze,
In pure and holy hiding.
—­O royal child of South and North,
Malcolm and Margaret,
The promised bride of Heaven art thou,
And Heaven will not forget!
What recks it, if an alien King
Encoronet thy brow,
Or if the false Italian priest
Pretend to loose the vow?’

O then to white the red rose went
On Edith’s cheek abiding!
With even glance she answer’d meek
’I leave the life I did not seek,
In holy Church confiding’:—­
Then Love smiled true on Henry’s face,
And Anselm join’d the hands
That in one race two races bound
By everlasting bands.
So Love is Lord, and Alfred’s blood
Returns the land to sway;
And all her joyous maidens join
In their soft roundelay:

—­For though the knight may fail in fight,
The red rust edge the sword,
The king his crown in dust lay down,
Yet Love is always Lord!

Edith, (who, after marriage, took the name Matilda
in compliment to Henry’s mother), daughter to
Malcolm King of Scotland by Margaret, granddaughter
of Edmund Ironside, had been brought up by her aunt
Christina, and placed in Romsey Abbey for security
against Norman violence. But she had always
refused to take the vows, and was hence, in opposition
to her aunt’s wish, declared canonically free
to marry by Anselm; called here an Italian priest,
as born at Aosta. Henry had been long attached
to the Princess, and married her shortly after his
accession.

Page 15

A CRUSADER’S TOMB

1230

Unnamed, unknown:—­his hands across his
breast
Set in sepulchral rest,
In yon low cave-like niche the warrior lies,
—­A shrine within a shrine,—­
Full of gray peace, while day to darkness dies.

Then the forgotten dead at midnight come
And throng their chieftain’s
tomb,
Murmuring the toils o’er which they toil’d,
alive,
The feats of sword and love;
And all the air thrills like a summer hive.

—­How so, thou say’st!—­This
is the poet’s right!
He looks with larger sight
Than they who hedge their view by present things,
The small, parochial world
Of sight and touch: and what he sees, he sings.

The steel-shell’d host, that, gleaming as it
turns,
Like autumn lightning burns,
A moment’s azure, the fresh flags that glance
As cornflowers o’er the corn,
Till war’s stern step show like a gala dance,

He also sees; and pierces to the heart,
Scanning the genuine part
Each Red-Cross pilgrim plays: Some, gold-enticed;
By love or lust or fame
Urged; or who yearn to kiss the grave of Christ

And find their own, life-wearied:—­Motley
band!
O! ere they quit the Land
How maim’d, how marr’d, how changed from
all that pride
In which so late they left
Orwell or Thames, with sails out-swelling wide

And music tuneable with the timing oar
Clear heard from shore to shore;
All Europe streaming to the mystic East!
—­Now on their sun-smit
ranks
The dusky squadrons close in vulture-feast,

And that fierce Day-star’s blazing ball their
sight
Sears with excess of light;
Or through dun sand-clouds the blue scimitar’s
edge
Slopes down like fire from heaven,
Mowing them as the thatcher mows the sedge.

Then many a heart remember’d, as the skies
Grew dark on dying eyes,
Sweet England; her fresh fields and gardens trim;
Her tree-embower’d halls;
And the one face that was the world to him.

—­And one who fought his fight and held
his way,
Through life’s long latter
day
Moving among the green, green English meads,
Ere in this niche he took
His rest, oft ’mid his kinsfolk told the deeds

Of that gay passage through the Midland sea;
Cyprus and Sicily;
And how the Lion-Heart o’er the Moslem host
Triumph’d in Ascalon
Or Acre, by the tideless Tyrian coast,

Yet never saw the vast Imperial dome,
Nor the thrice-holy Tomb:—­
—­As that great vision of the hidden Grail
By bravest knights of old
Unseen:—­seen only of pure Parcivale.

Page 16

The ‘Thud Crusade,’ 1189-1193, is the
subject of this poem. Richard Coeur de Lion
carried his followers by way of Sicily and Cyprus:
making a transient conquest of the latter. In
the Holy Land the siege of Acre consumed the time
and strength of the Crusaders. They suffered
terribly in the wilderness of Mount Carmel, and when
at last preparing to march on Jerusalem (1192) were
recalled to Ascalon. Richard now advanced to
Bethany, but was unable to reach the Holy City.
The tale is that while riding with a party of knights
one of them called out, ’This way, my lord,
and you will see Jerusalem.’ But Richard
hid his face and said, ’Alas!—­they
who are not worthy to win the Holy City are not worthy
to behold it.’

The vast Imperial dome; The Church of the Holy
Sepulchre was built by the Emperor Constantine; A.D.
326-335.

The hidden Grail; This vision forms the subject
of one of Tennyson’s noblest Idylls.

The Prince fell on him like a hawk
At Al’ster yester-eve,
And flaunts his captured banner now
And flaunts but to deceive:—­
—­Look round! for Mortimer is by,
And guards the rearward river:—­
The hour that parted sire and son
Has parted them for ever!

‘Young Simon’s dead,’ he thinks,
and look’d
Upon his living son:
’Now God have mercy on our souls,
Our bodies are undone!
But, Hugh and Henry, ye can fly
Before their bowmen smite us—­
They come on well! But ’tis from me
They learn’d the skill to fight us.’

—­’For England’s cause, and
England’s laws,
With you we fight and fall!’
—­’Together, then, and die like men,
And Heaven has room for all!’
—­Then, face to face, and limb to limb,
And sword with sword inwoven,
That stubborn courage of the race
On Evesham field was proven

O happy hills! O summer sky
Above the valley bent!
Your peacefulness rebukes the rage
Of blood on blood intent!
No thought was then for death or life
Through that long dreadful hour,
While Simon ’mid his faithful few
Stood like an iron tower,

’Gainst which the winds and waves are hurl’d
In vain, unmoved, foursquare;
And round him raged the insatiate swords
Of Edward and De Clare:
And round him in the narrow combe
His white-cross comrades rally,
While ghastly gashings, cloud the beck
And crimson all the valley,

And triple sword-thrusts meet his sword,
And thrice the charge he foils,
Though now in threefold flood the foe
Round those devoted boils:
And still the light of England’s cause
And England’s love was o’er him,
Until he saw his gallant boy
Go down in blood before him:—­

Page 17

He hove his huge two-handed blade,
He cried ‘’Tis time to die!’
And smote around him like a flail,
And clear’d a space to lie:—­
’Thank God!’—­no more;—­nor
now could life
From loved and lost divide him:—­
And night fell o’er De Montfort dead,
And England wept beside him.

In the words given here to Simon (and, indeed, in
the bulk of my narrative) I have almost literally
followed Prothero’s Life. The struggle,
like other critical conflicts in the days of unprofessional
war, was very brief.

THE DIRGE OF LLYWELYN

December 10: 1282

Llanyis on Irfon, thine oaks in the drear
Red eve of December are wind-swept and sere,
Where a king by the stream in his agony lies,
And the life of a land ebbs away as he dies.

Caradoc, thy sceptre for centuries kept,
Shall it pass like the ripple, unhonour’d, unwept:
Unknowing the lance, and the victim unknown,
Far from Aberffraw’s halls and Eryri the lone!

O dark day of winter and Cambria’s shame,
To the treason of Builth when from Gwynedd he came,
And Walwyn and Frankton and Mortimer fell
Closed round unawares by the fold in the dell!

—­As who, where the shadow beneath him is
thrown,
By some well in Saharan high noontide alone
Sits under the palm-tree, nor hears the low breath
Of the russet-maned foe panting hot for his death;

So Llywelyn,—­unarm’d, unaware:—­Is
it she,
Bright star of his morning, when Gwynedd was free,
Fair bride, the long sought, taken early, goes by?
In the heart of the breeze the lost Eleanor’s
sigh?

Or the one little daughter’s sweet face with
a gleam
Of glamour looks out, as the dream in a dream?
Or for childhood’s first sunshine and calm does
he yearn,
As the days of Maesmynan in memory return?

Or,—­dear to the heart’s-blood as
first-love or wife,—­
The mountains whose freedom was one with his life,
Gray farms and green vales of that ancient domain,
The thousand-years’ kingdom, he dreams of again?

Or is it the rage of stark Edward; the base
Unkingly revenge on a kinglier race;
The wrong idly wrought on the patriot dead;
The dark castle of doom; the scorn-diadem’d
head?

—­Lo, where Rhodri and Owain await thee!—­The
foe
Slips nearing in silence: one flash—­and
one blow!
And the ripple that passes wafts down to the Wye
The last prayer of Llywelyn, the nation’s last
sigh.

But Llanynis yet sees the white rivulet gleam,
And the leaf of December fall sere on the stream;
While Irfon his dirge whispers on through the combe,
And the purple-topt hills gather round in their gloom.

Where a king; The war in which Llywelyn fell
was the inevitable result of the growing power of
England under Edward I; and, considering the vast
preponderance of weight against the Welsh Prince it
could not have ended but in the conquest of Wales.
Yet its issue, as told here, was determined as if
by chance.

Page 18

Aberffraw; in Anglesea: the residence
of the royal line of Gywnedd from the time of Rhodri
Mawr onwards.

Eryri; the Eagle’s rock is a name for
Snowdon. The bird has been seen in the neighbourhood
within late years.

Is it she; Eleanor, daughter to Simon de Montfort.
After some years of betrothal and impediment arising
from the jealousy of Edward I, she and Llywelyn were
married in 1278. But after only two years of
happiness, Eleanor died, leaving one child, Catharine
or Gwenllian.

Maesmynan; by Caerwys in Flintshire; where
Llywelyn lived retiredly in youth.

The thousand-years’ kingdom; The descent
of the royal house of North Wales is legendarily traced
from Caradoc-Caractacus. But the accepted genealogy
of the Princes of Gwynedd begins with Cunedda Wledig
(Paramount) cir. 400: ending in 1282 with Llywelyn
son of Gruffydd.

The scorn-diadem’d head; On finding whom
he had slain, Frankton carried Llywelyn’s head
to Edward at Rhuddlan, who, with a barbarity unworthy
of himself, set it over the Tower of London, wreathed
in mockery of a prediction (ascribed to Merlin) upon
the coronation of a Welsh Prince in London.

Rhodri and Owain; Rhodri Mawr, (843), who united
under his supremacy the other Welsh principalities,
Powys and Dinefawr; Owain Gwynedd, (1137),—­are
among the most conspicuous of Llywelyn’s royal
predecessors.

THE REJOICING OF THE LAND

1295

So the land had rest! and the cloud of that heart-sore
struggle and pain
Rose from her ancient hills, and peace shone o’er
her again,
Sunlike chasing the plagues wherewith the land was
defiled;
And the leprosy fled, and her flesh came again, as
the flesh of a child.
—­They were stern and stark, the three children
of Rolf, the first from
Anjou:
For their own sake loving the land, mayhap, but loving
her true;
France the wife, and England the handmaid; yet over
the realm
Their eyes were in every place, their hands gripp’d
firm on the helm.
Villein and earl, the cowl and the plume, they were
bridled alike;
One law for all, but arm’d law,—­not
swifter to aid than to strike.
Lo, in the twilight transept, the holy places of God,
Not with sunset the steps of the altar are dyed, but
with scarlet of
blood!
Clang of iron-shod feet, and sheep for their shepherd
who cry;
Curses and swords that flash, and the victim proffer’d
to die!
—­Bare thy own back to the smiter, O king,
at the shrine of the dead:
Thy friend thou hast slain in thy folly; the blood
of the Saint on thy
head:
Proud and priestly, thou say’st;—­yet
tender and faithful and pure;
True man, and so, true saint;—­the crown
of his martyrdom sure:—­
As friend with his friend, he could brave thee and
warn; thou hast
silenced the voice,
Ne’er to be heard again:—­nor again

Page 19

will Henry rejoice!
Green Erin may yield her, fair Scotland submit; but
his sunshine is o’er;
The tooth of the serpent, the child of his bosom,
has smote him so sore:—­
Like a wolf from the hounds he dragg’d off to
his lair, not turning to
bay:—­
Crying ’shame on a conquer’d king!’—­the
grim ghost fled sullen away.
—­Then, as in gray Autumn the heavens are
pour’d on the rifted hillside,
When the Rain-stars mistily gleam, and torrents leap
white in their
pride,
And the valley is all one lake, and the late, unharvested
shocks
Are rapt to the sea, the dwellings of man, the red
kine and the flocks,—­
O’er England the ramparts of law, the old landmarks
of liberty fell,
As the brothers in blood and in lust, twin horror
begotten of hell,
Suck’d all the life of the land to themselves,
like Lofoden in flood,
One in his pride, in his subtlety one, mocking England
and God.
Then tyranny’s draught—­once only—­we
drank to the dregs!—­and the stain
Went crimson and black through the soul of the land,
for all time, not in
vain!
We bore the bluff many-wived king, rough rival and
victor of Rome;
We bore the stern despot-protector, whose dawning
and sunset were gloom;
For they temper’d the self of the tyrant with
love of the land,
Some touch of the heart, some remorse, refraining
the grip of the hand.
But John’s was blackness of darkness, a day
of vileness and shame;
Shrieks of the tortured, and silence, and outrage
the mouth cannot name.
—­O that cry of the helpless, the weak that
writhe under the foe,
Wrong man-wrought upon man, dumb unwritten annals
of woe!
Cry that goes upward from earth as she rolls through
the peace of the
skies
‘How long? Hast thou forgotten, O God!’
. . . and silence replies!
Silence:—­and then was the answer;—­the
light o’er Windsor that broke,
The Meadow of Law—­true Avalon where the
true Arthur awoke!
—­Not thou, whose name, as a seed o’er
the world, plume-wafted on air,
Britons on each side sea,—­Caerlleon and
Cumbria,—­share,
Joy of a downtrod race, dear hope of freedom to-be,
Dream of poetic hearts, whom the vision only can see!
. . .
For thine were the fairy knights, fair ideals of beauty
and song;
But ours, in the ways of men, walk’d sober,
and stumbling, and strong;—­
Stumbling as who in peril and twilight their pathway
trace out,
Hard to trace, and untried, and the foe above and
about;
For the Charter of Freedom, the voice of the land
in her Council secure
All doing, all daring,—­and, e’en
when defeated, of victory sure!
Langton, our Galahad, first, stamp’d Leader
by Rome unaware,
Pembroke and Mowbray, Fitzwarine, Fitzalan, Fitzwalter,
De Clare:—­
—­O fair temple of Freedom and Law!—­the
foundations ye laid:—­
But again came the storm, and the might of darkness
and wrong was
array’d,
A warfare of years; and the battle raged, and new
heroes arose

Page 20

From a soil that is fertile in manhood’s men,
and scatter’d the foes,
And set in their place the bright pillars of Order,
Liberty’s shrine,
O’er the land far-seen, as o’er Athens
the home of Athena divine.
—­So the land had rest:—­and the
cloud of that heart-sore struggle and
pain
Sped from her ancient hills, and peace shone o’er
her again,
Sunlike chasing the plagues wherewith the land was
defiled:
And the leprosy fled, and her flesh came again, as
the flesh of a child.
For lo! the crown’d Statesman of Law, Justinian
himself of his realm,
Edward, since Alfred our wisest of all who have watch’d
by the helm!
He who yet preaches in silence his life-word, the
light of his way,
From his marble unadorn’d chest, in the heart
of the West Minster gray,Keep thy Faith . . . In the great town-twilight,
this city of gloom,
—­O how unlike that blithe London he look’d
on!—­I look on his tomb,
In the circle of kings, round the shrine, where the
air is heavy with
fame,
Dust of our moulder’d chieftains, and splendour
shrunk to a name.
Silent synod august, ye that tried the delight and
the pain,
Trials and snares of a throne, was the legend written
in vain?
Speak, for ye know, crown’d shadows! who down
each narrow and strait
As ye might, once guided,—­a perilous passage,—­the
keel of the State,
Fourth Henry, fourth Edward, Elizabeth, Charles,—­now
ye rest from your
toil,
Was it best, when by truth and compass ye steer’d,
or by statecraft and
guile?
Or is it so hard, that steering of States, that as
men who throw in
With party their life, honour soils his own ermine,
a lie is no sin? . . .
—­Not so, great Edward, with thee,—­not
so!—­For he learn’d in his youth
The step straightforward and sure, the proud, bright
bearing of truth:—­
Arm’d against Simon at Evesham, yet not less,
striking for Law,—­
Ages of temperate freedom, a vision of order, he saw!—­
—­Vision of opulent years, a murmur of welfare
and peace:
Orchard golden-globed, plain waving in golden increase;
Hopfields fairer than vineyards, green laughing tendrils
and bine;
Woodland misty in sunlight, and meadow sunny with
kine;—­
Havens of heaving blue, where the keels of Guienne
and the Hanse
Jostle and creak by the quay, and the mast goes up
like a lance,
Gay with the pennons of peace, and, blazon’d
with Adria’s dyes,
Purple and orange, the sails like a sunset burn in
the skies.
Bloodless conquests of commerce, that nation with
nation unite!
Hand clasp’d frankly in hand, not steel-clad
buffets in fight:
On the deck strange accents and shouting; rough furcowl’d
men of the
north,
Genoa’s brown-neck’d sons, and whom swarthy
Smyrna sends forth:
Freights of the south; drugs potent o’er death
from the basilisk won,
Odorous Phoenix-nest, and spice of a sunnier sun:—­
Butts of Malvasian nectar, Messene’s vintage

Page 21

of old,
Cyprian webs, damask of Arabia mazy with gold:
Sendal and Samite and Tarsien, and sardstones ruddy
as wine,
Graved by Athenian diamond with forms of beauty divine.
To the quay from the gabled alleys, the huddled ravines
of the town,
Twilights of jutting lattice and beam, the Guild-merchants
come down,
Cheapening the gifts of the south, the sea-borne alien
bales,
For the snow-bright fleeces of Leom’ster, the
wealth of Devonian vales;
While above them, the cavernous gates, on which knight-robbers
have gazed
Hopeless, in peace look down, their harrows of iron
upraised;
And Dustyfoot enters at will with his gay Autolycus
load,
And the maidens are flocking as doves when they fling
the light grain on
the road.
Low on the riverain mead, where the dull clay-cottages
cling
To the tall town-ward and the towers, as nests of
the martin in spring,
Where the year-long fever lurks, and gray leprosy
burrows secure,
Are the wattled huts of the Friars, the long, white
Church of the poor:
—­Haven of wearied eyelids; of hearts that
care not to live;
Shadow and silence of prayer; the peace which the
world cannot give!
Tapers hazily gloaming through fragrance the censers
outpour;
Chant ever rising and rippling in sweetness, as waves
on the shore;
Casements of woven stone, with more than the rainbow
bedyed;
Beauty of holiness! Spell yet unbroken by riches
and pride!
—­Ah! could it be so for ever!—­the
good aye better’d by Time:—­
First-Faith, first-Wisdom, first-Love,—­to
the end be true to their
prime! . .
Far rises the storm o’er horizons unseen, that
will lay them in dust,
Crashings of plunder’d cloisters, and royal
insatiate lust:—­
Far, unseen, unheard!—­Meanwhile the great
Minster on high
Like a stream of music, aspiring, harmonious, springs
to the sky:—­
Story on story ascending their buttress’d beauty
unfold,
Till the highest height is attain’d, and the
Cross shines star-like in
gold,
Set as a meteor in heaven; a sign of health and release:—­
And the land rejoices below, and the heart-song of
England is Peace.

This date has been chosen as representing at once
the culminating point in the reign of Edward, and
of Mediaevalism in England. The sound, the fascinating
elements of that period rapidly decline after the thirteenth
century in Church and State, in art and in learning.

‘In the person of the great Edward,’ says
Freeman, ’the work of reconciliation is completed.
Norman and Englishman have become one under the best
and greatest of our later Kings, the first who, since
the Norman entered our land, . . . followed a purely
English policy.’

The three children; William I and II, and Henry
I.

The transept; of Canterbury Cathedral, after
Becket’s death named the ‘Martyrdom.’

Nor again; See the Early Plantagenets,
by Bishop Stubbs: one of the very few masterpieces
among the shoal of little books on great subjects
in which a declining literature is fertile.

Page 22

Britons on each side sea; Armorica and Cornwall,
Wales and Strathclyde, all share in the great Arthurian
legend.

Justinian; ‘Edward,’ says Dr. Stubbs,
’is the great lawgiver, the great politician,
the great organiser of the mediaeval English polity:’
(Early Plantagenets).

Keep thy Faith; ‘Pactum serva’
may be still seen inscribed on the huge stone coffin
of Edward I.

The keels of Guienne . . . Adria’s dyes;
The ships of Gascony, of the Hanse Towns, of Genoa,
of Venice, are enumerated amongst those which now
traded with England.

Malvasian nectar; ‘Malvoisie,’
the sweet wine of the Southern Morea, gained its name
from Monemvasia, or Napoli di Malvasia, its port of
shipment.

Sendal; A thin rich silk. Samite; A
very rich stuff, sometimes wholly of silk, often crimson,
interwoven with gold and silver thread, and embroidered.
Tarsien; Silken stuff from Tartary.

Athenian diamond; A few very fine early gems
ascribed to Athens, are executed wholly with diamond-point.

The snow-bright fleeces; Those of Leominster
were very long famous.

Devonian vales; The ancient mining region west
of Tavistock.

Dustyfoot; Old name for pedlar.

CRECY

August 26: 1346

At Crecy by Somme in Ponthieu
High up on a windy hill
A mill stands out like a tower;
King Edward stands on the mill.
The plain is seething below
As Vesuvius seethes with flame,
But O! not with fire, but gore,
Earth incarnadined o’er,
Crimson with shame and with fame!—­
To the King run the messengers, crying
‘Thy Son is hard-press’d to the dying!’
—­’Let alone: for to-day will
be written in story
To the great world’s end, and for ever:
So let the boy have the glory.’

Erin and Gwalia there
With England are one against France;
Outfacing the oriflamme red
The red dragons of Merlin advance:—­
As harvest in autumn renew’d
The lances bend o’er the fields;
Snow-thick our arrow-heads white
Level the foe as they light;
Knighthood to yeomanry yields:—­
Proud heart, the King watches, as higher
Goes the blaze of the battle, and nigher:—­
’To-day is a day will be written in story
To the great world’s end, and for ever!
Let the boy alone have the glory.’

Harold at Senlac-on-Sea
By Norman arrow laid low,—­
When the shield-wall was breach’d by
the shaft,
—­Thou art avenged by the bow!
Chivalry! name of romance!
Thou art henceforth but a name!
Weapon that none can withstand,
Yew in the Englishman’s hand,
Flight-shaft unerring in aim!
As a lightning-struck forest the foemen
Shiver down to the stroke of the bowmen:—­
—­’O to-day is a day will be written
in story
To the great world’s end, and for ever!
So, let the boy have the glory.’

Page 23

Pride of Liguria’s shore
Genoa wrestles in vain;
Vainly Bohemia’s King
Kinglike is laid with the slain.
The Blood-lake is wiped-out in blood,
The shame of the centuries o’er;
Where the pride of the Norman had sway
The lions lord over the fray,
The legions of France are no more:—­
—­The Prince to his father kneels lowly;
—­’His is the battle! his wholly!
For to-day is a day will be written in story
To the great world’s end, and for ever:—­
So, let him have the spurs, and the glory!’

Erin and Gwalia; Half of Edward’s army
consisted of light armed footmen from Ireland and
Wales—­the latter under their old Dragon-flag.

Chivalry; The feudal idea of an army, resting
’on the superiority of the horseman to the footman,
of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl,’
may be said to have been ruined by this battle:
(Green, B. IV: ch. iii).

Liguria; 15,000 cross-bowmen from Genoa were
in Philip’s army.

The Blood-lake; Senlac; Hastings.

THE BLACK SEATS

1348-9

Blue and ever
more blue
The sky of that
summer’s spring:
No cloud from
dawning to night:
The lidless eyeball
of light
Glared: nor could e’en
in darkness the dew
Her pearls on
the meadow-grass string.
As a face of a
hundred years,
Mummied and scarr’d,
for the heart
Is long dry at
the fountain of tears,
Green earth lay
brown-faced and torn,
Scarr’d
and hard and forlorn.
And as that foul
monster of Lerna
Whom Heracles
slew in his might,
But this one slaying,
not slain,
From the marshes,
poisonous, white,
Crawl’d out a plague-mist
and sheeted the plain,
A hydra of hell
and of night.
—­Whence upon men has
that horror past?
From Cathaya westward it stole to
Byzance,—­
The City of Flowers,—­the
vineyards of France;—­
O’er the salt-sea ramparts
of England, last,
Reeking and rank, a serpent’s
breath:—­
What is this, men cry in their fear, what is this
that cometh?
’Tis the
Black Death, they whisper:
The
black black Death!

The heart of man at the name
To a ball of ice shrinks in,
With hope, surrendering life:—­
The husband looks on the wife,
Reading the tokens of doom in the frame,
The pest-boil hid in the skin,
And flees and leaves her to die.
Fear-sick, the mother beholds
In her child’s pure crystalline eye
A dull shining, a sign of despair.
Lo, the heavens are poison, not air;
And they fall as when lambs in the pasture
With a moan that is hardly a moan,
Drop, whole flocks, where they stand;
And the mother lays her, alone,
Slain by the touch of her nursing hand,
Where the household before her is strown.

Page 24

—­Earth, Earth, open and cover thy dead!
For they are smitten and fall who bear
The corpse to the grave with a prayerless prayer,
And thousands are crush’d in the common bed:—­
—­Is it Hell that breathes with an adder’s
breath?
Is it the day of doom, men cry, the Judge that cometh?
—­’Tis the Black Death, God
help us!
The black black Death.

Maid Alice and maid Margaret
In the fields have built them a bower
Of reedmace and rushes fine,
Fenced with sharp albespyne;
Pretty maids hid in the nest; and yet
Yours is one death, and one hour!
Priest and peasant and lord
By the swift, soft stroke of the air,
By a silent invisible sword,
In plough-field or banquet, fall:
The watchers are flat on the wall:—­
Through city and village and valley
The sweet-voiced herald of prayer
Is dumb in the towers; the throng
To the shrine pace barefoot; and where
Blazed out from the choir a glory of song,
God’s altar is lightless and bare.
Is there no pity in earth or sky?
The burden of England, who shall say?
Half the giant oak is riven away,
And the green leaves yearn for the leaves that
die.
Will the whole world drink of the dragon’s
breath?
It is the cup, men cry, the cup of God’s fury
that cometh!
’Tis the Black Death, Lord help us!
The black black Death.

In England is heard a moan,
A bitter lament and a sore,
Rachel lamenting her dead,
And will not be comforted
For the little faces for ever gone,
The feet from the silent floor.
And a cry goes up from the land,
Take from us in mercy, O God,
Take from us the weight of Thy hand,
The cup and the wormwood of woe!
’Neath the terrible barbs of Thy bow
This England, this once Thy beloved,
Is water’d with life-blood for rain;
The bones of her children are white,
As flints on the Golgotha plain;
Not slain as warriors by warriors in fight,
By the arrows of Heaven slain.
We have sinn’d: we lift up our souls
to Thee,
O Lord God eternal on high:
Thou who gavest Thyself to die,
Saviour, save! to Thy feet we flee:—­
Snatch from the hell and the Enemy’s breath,
From the Prince of the Air, from the terror by night
that cometh:—­
From the Black Death, Christ save us!
The black black Death!

That foul monster; The Lernaean Hydra of Greek
legend.

From the marshes; The drought which preceded
the plague in England, and may have predisposed to
its reception, was followed by mist, in which the
people fancied they saw the disease palpably advancing.

From Cathaya; The plague was heard of in Central
Asia in 1333; it reached Constantinople in 1347.

The City of Flowers; Florence, where the ravages
of the plague were immortalized in the Decamerone
of Boccaccio.

The pest boil; Seems to have been the enlarged
and discharging gland by which the specific blood-poison
of the plague relieved itself. A ’muddy
glistening’ of the eye is noticed as one of the
symptoms.

Page 25

The common bed; More than 50,000 are said to
have been buried on the site of the Charter House.

Albespyne; Hawthorn.

Half the giant oak; ’Of the three or
four millions who then formed the population of England,
more than one-half were swept away’: (Green,
B. IV: ch. iii).

THE PILGRIM AND THE PLOUGHMAN

1382

It is a dream, I know:—­Yet on the past
Of this dear England if in thought we gaze,
About her seems a constant sunshine cast;
In summer calm we see and golden haze
The little London of Plantagenet days;
Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes,
And thorny spires aflame with starlike vanes.

Our silver Thames all yet unspoil’d and clear;
The many-buttress’d bridge that stems the tide;
Black-timber’d wharves; arcaded walls, that
rear
Long, golden-crested roofs of civic pride:—­
While flaunting galliots by the gardens glide,
And on Spring’s frolic air the May-song swells,
Mix’d with the music of a thousand bells.

Beyond the bridge a mazy forest swims,
Great spars and sails and flame-tongued flags on high,
Wedged round the quay, a-throng with ruddy limbs
And faces bronzed beneath another sky:
And ’mid the press sits one with aspect shy
And downcast eyes of watching, and, the while,
The deep observance of an inward smile.

In hooded mantle gray he smiled and sate,
With ink-horn at his knees and scroll and pen.
And took the toll and register’d the freight,
’Mid noise of clattering cranes and strife of
men:
And all that moved and spoke was in his ken,
With lines and hues like Nature’s own design’d
Deep in the magic mirror of his mind.

Thence oft, returning homeward, on the book,—­
His of Certaldo, or the bard whose lays
Were lost to love in Scythia,—­he would
look
Till his fix’d eyes the dancing letters daze:
Then forth to the near fields, and feed his gaze
On one fair flower in starry myriads spread,
And in her graciousness be comforted:—­

Then, joyous with a poet’s joy, to draw
With genial touch, and strokes of patient skill,
The very image of each thing he saw:—­
He limn’d the man all round, for good or ill,
Having both sighs and laughter at his will;
Life as it went he grasp’d in vision true,
Yet stood outside the scene his pencil drew.

—­Man’s inner passions in their conscience-strife,
The conflicts of the heart against the heart,
The mother yearning o’er the infant’s
life,
The maiden wrong’d by wealth and lecherous art,
The leper’s loathsome cell from man apart,
War’s hell of lust and fire, the village-woe,
The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,—­

Not his to draw,—­to see, perhaps:—­Our
eyes
Hold bias with our humour:—­His, to paint
With Nature’s freshness, what before him lies:
The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint:
His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint,
The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved;
Loving the world, and by the world beloved.

Page 26

So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimage
Through England’s humours; in immortal song
Bodying the form and pressure of his age,
Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong;
Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng,
Seen in his mind so vividly, that we
Know them more clearly than the men we see.

Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train’d;
First in his pages Nature wedding Art
Of all our sons of song; yet he remain’d
True English of the English at his heart:—­
He stood between two worlds, yet had no part
In that new order of the dawning day
Which swept the masque of chivalry away.

O Poet of romance and courtly glee
And downcast eager glance that shuns the sky,
Above, about, are signs thou canst not see,
Portents in heaven and earth!—­And one goes
by
With other than thy prosperous, laughing eye,
Framing the rough web of his rueful lays,
The sorrow and the sin—­with bitter gaze

As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shade
Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train,
In silver samite knight and dame and maid
Ride to the tourney on the barrier’d plain;
And he must bow in humble mute disdain,
And that worst woe of baffled souls endure,
To see the evil that they may not cure.

For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay,
Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:—­
Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!—­for the May
Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream
From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam
Of alien freshness on her forehead fair,
And Heaven itself within the common air.

Then on the mead in vision Langland saw
A pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as those
Whom Chaucer’s hand surpass’d itself to
draw,
Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;—­
But such as dungeon foul or spital shows,
Or the serf’s fever-den, or field of fight,
When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.

No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek,
Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn,
Mocking and mock’d; with plague and hunger weak,
And haggard faces bleach’d as those who mourn,
And footsteps redden’d with the trodden thorn;
Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain,
Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.

A land whose children toil and rot like beasts,
Robbers and robb’d by turns, the dreamer sees:—­
Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests,
Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease
’Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries;
Times out of joint, a universe of lies,
Till Love divine appear in Ploughman’s guise

To burn the gilded tares and save the land,
Risen from the grave and walking earth again:—­
—­And as he dream’d and kiss’d
the nail-pierced hand,
A hundred towers their Easter voices rain
In silver showers o’er hill and vale and plain,
And the air throbb’d with sweetness, and he
woke
And all the dream in light and music broke.

Page 27

—­He look’d around, and saw the world
he left
When to that visionary realm of song
His spirit fled from bonds of flesh bereft;
And on the vision he lay musing long,
As o’er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng,
Old measures half-disused; and grasp’d his pen,
And drew his cottage-Christ for homely men.

Thus Langland also took his pilgrimage;
Rough lone knight-errant on uncourtly ways,
And wrong and woe were charter’d on his page,
With some horizon-glimpse of sweeter days.
And on the land the message of his lays
Smote like the strong North-wind, and cleansed the
sky
With wholesome blast and bitter clarion-cry,

Summoning the people in the Ploughman’s name.
—­So fought his fight, and pass’d
unknown away;
Seeking no other praise, no sculptured fame
Nor laureate honours for his artless lay,
Nor in the Minster laid with high array;—­
But where the May-thorn gleams, the grasses wave,
And the wind sighs o’er a forgotten grave.

Langland, whom I have put here in contrast with Chaucer,
is said to have lived between 1332 and 1400.
His Vision of Piers the Plowman (who is partially
identified with our blessed Saviour), with some added
poems, forms an allegory on life in England, in Church
and State, as it appeared to him during the dislocated
and corrupt age which followed the superficial glories
of Edward the Third’s earlier years.

Took the toll; Amongst other official employments,
Chaucer was Comptroller of the Customs in the Port
of London. See his House of Fame; and
the beautiful picture of his walks at dawning in the
daisy-meadows: Prologue to the Legend of
Good Women.

His of Certaldo, . . . in Scythia; Boccaccio:—­and
Ovid, who died in exile at Tomi:—­to both
of whom Chaucer is greatly indebted for the substance
of his tales.

Picture-like; ’It is chiefly as a comic
poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances,
that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry
he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs
like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes
to coarse satire or merry narrative’ (Hallam,
Mid. Ages: Ch. IX: Pt. iii).

The Tabard; Inn in Southwark whence the pilgrims
to Canterbury start.

Down the Strand; It is thus that Langland describes
himself and his feelings of dissatisfaction with the
world.

That worst woe; Literature, even ancient literature,
has no phrase more deeply felt and pathetic than the
words which the Persian nobleman at the feast in Thebes
before Plataea addressed to Thersander of Orchomenus:—­[Greek
text]: (Herodotus, IX: xvi).

One morn he lay; The Vision opens with
a picture of the poet asleep on Malvern Hill:
the last of the added poems closing as he wakes with
the Easter chimes.

Old measures; Langland’s metre ’is
more uncouth than that of his predecessors’
(Hallam, Mid. Ag. Ch. IX:
Pt. iii).

Page 28

In the Minster; Chaucer was buried at the entrance
of S. Benet’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey.

JEANNE D’ARC

1424

So many stars in heaven,—­
Flowers in the meadow that shine;
—­This little one of Domremy,
What special grace is thine?
By the fairy beech and the fountain
What but a child with thy brothers?
Among the maids of the valley
Art more than one among others?

Chosen darling of Heaven,
Yet at heart wast only a child!
And for thee the wild things of Nature
Sot aside their nature wild:—­
The brown-eyed fawn of the forest
Came silently glancing upon thee;
The squirrel slipp’d down from the fir,
And nestled his gentleness on thee.

Angelus bell and Ave,
Like voices they follow the maid
As she follows her sheep in the valley
From the dawn to the folding shade:—­
For the world that we cannot see
Is the world of her earthly seeing;
From the air of the hills of God
She draws her breath and her being.

Dances by beech tree and fountain,
They know her no longer:—­apart
Sitting with thought and with vision
In the silent shrine of the heart.
And a voice henceforth and for ever
Within, without her, is sighing
’Pity for France, O pity,
France the beloved, the dying!’

—­Now between church-wall and cottage
What comes in the blinding light,
—­Rainbow plumes and armour,
Face as the sun in his height . . .
’Angel that pierced the red dragon,
Pity for France, O pity!
Holy one, thou shalt save her,
Vineyard and village and city!’

Poor sweet child of Domremy,
In thine innocence only strong,
Thou seest not the treason before thee,
The gibe and the curse of the throng,—­
The furnace-pile in the market
That licks out its flames to take thee;—­
For He who loves thee in heaven
On earth will not forsake thee!

Poor sweet maid of Domremy,
In thine innocence secure,
Heed not what men say of thee,
The buffoon and his jest impure!
Nor care if thy name, young martyr,
Be the star of thy country’s story:—­
Mid the white-robed host of the heavens
Thou hast more than glory!

Angel that pierced; ’She had pity,
to use the phrase for ever on her lip, on the fair
realm of France. She saw visions; St. Michael
appeared to her in a flood of blinding light’:
(Green, B. IV: ch. vi).

The buffoon; Voltaire.

TOWTON FIELD

Palm Sunday: 1461

Love, Who from the throne above
Cam’st to teach the law of love,
Who Thy peaceful triumph hast
Led o’er palms before Thee cast,
E’en in highest heaven Thine eyes
Turn from this day’s sacrifice!
Slaughter whence no victor host
Can the palms of triumph boast;
Blood on blood in rivers spilt,—­
English blood by English guilt!

Page 29

From the gracious Minster-towers
Of York the priests behold afar
The field of Towton shimmer like a star
With light of lance and helm; while both the powers
Misnamed from the fair rose, with one fell blow,
—­In snow-dazed, blinding air
Mass’d on the burnside bare,—­
Each army, as one man, drove at the opposing foe.

Ne’er since then, and
ne’er before,
On England’s fields with English hands
Have met for death such myriad myriad bands,
Such wolf-like fury, and such greed of gore:—­
No natural kindly touch, no check of shame:
And no such bestial rage
Blots our long story’s page;
Such lewd remorseless swords, such selfishness of
aim

—­Gracious Prince
of Peace! Yet Thou
May’st look and bless with lenient eyes
When trodden races ’gainst their tyrant rise,
And the bent back no more will deign to bow:
Or when they crush some old anarchic feud,
And found the throne anew
On Law to Freedom true,
Cleansing the land they love from guilt of blood by
blood.

Nor did Heaven unmoved behold
When Hellas, for her birthright free
Dappling with gore the dark Saronian sea,
The Persian wave back, past Abydos, roll’d:—­
But in this murderous match of chief ’gainst
chief
No chivalry had part,
No impulse of the heart;
Nor any sigh for Right triumphant breathes relief.

—­Midday comes:
and no release,
No carnage-pause to blow on blow!
While through the choir the palm-wreathed children
go,
And gay hosannas hail the Prince of Peace:—­
And evening falls, and from the Minster height
They see the wan Ouse stream
Blood-dark with slaughter gleam,
And hear the demon-struggle shrieking through the
night.

Love, o’er palms in triumph strown
Passing, through the crowd alone,—­
Silent ’mid the exulting cry,—­
At Jerusalem to die:
Thou, foreknowing all, didst know
How Thy blood in vain would flow!
How our madness oft would prove
Recreant to the law of love:
Wrongs that men from men endure
Doing Thee to death once more!

’On the 29th of March 1461 the two armies encountered
one another at Towton Field, near Tadcaster.
In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible
obstinacy of the struggle, no such battle had been
seen in England since the field of Senlac. The
two armies together numbered nearly 120,000 men’:
(Green, B. IV: ch. vi).

Saronian sea; Scene of the battle of Salamis,
B.C. 480.

They see the wan Ouse stream; Mr. R. Wilton,
of Londesborough, has kindly pointed out to me that
Wharfe, which from a brook received the bloodshed
of Towton, does not discharge into Ouse until
about ten miles south of York. The gleam
is, therefore, visionary: (1889).

GROCYN AT OXFORD

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

Page 30

1491

As she who in some village-child
unknown,
With rustic grace and fantasy bedeck’d
And in her simple loveliness alone,
A sister finds;—­and the
long years’ neglect
Effaces with warm love and nursing
care,
And takes her
heart to heart,
And in her treasured treasures bids her freely share,

And robes with radiance new, new
strength and grace:—­
Hellas and England! thus it was
with ye!
Though distanced far by centuries
and by space,
Sisters in soul by Nature’s
own decree.
And if on Athens in her glory-day
The younger might
not look,
Her living soul came back, and reinfused our clay.

—­It was not wholly lost,
that better light,
Not in the darkest darkness of our
day;
From cell to cell, e’en through
the Danish night,
The torch ran on its firefly fitful
way;
And blazed anew with him who in
the vale
Of fair Aosta
saw
The careless reaper-bands, and pass’d the heavens’
high pale,

And supp’d with God, in vision!
Or with him,
Earliest and greatest of his name,
who gave
His life to Nature, in her caverns
dim
Tracking her soul, through poverty
to the grave,
And left his Great Work to the barbarous
age
That, in its folly-love,
With wizard-fame defamed his and sweet Vergil’s
page.

But systems have their day, and
die, or change
Transform’d to new: Not
now from cloister-cell
And desk-bow’d priest, breathes
out that impulse strange
’Neath which the world of
feudal Europe fell:—­
Throes of new birth, new life; while
men despair’d
Or triumph’d
in their pride,
As in their eyes the torch of learning fiercely flared.

For now the cry of Homer’s
clarion first
And Plato’s golden tongue
on English ears
And souls aflame for that new doctrine
burst,
As Grocyn taught, when, after studious
years,
He came from Arno to the liberal
walls
That welcomed
me in youth,
And nursed in Grecian lore, long native to her halls.

O voice that spann’d the gulf
of vanish’d years,
Evoking shapes of old from night
to light,
Lo at thy spell a long-lost world
appears,
Where Rome and Hellas break upon
our sight:—­
The Gothic gloom divides; a glory
burns
Behind the clouds
of Time,
And all that wonder-past in beauty’s glow returns.

—­For when the Northern
floods that lash’d and curl’d
Around the granite fragments of
great Rome
Outspread Colossus-like athwart
the world,
Foam’d down, and the new nations
found their home,
That earlier Europe, law and arts
and arms,
Fell into far-off
shade,
Or lay like some fair maid sleep-sunk in magic charms.

Page 31

And as in lands once flourishing,
now forlorn,
And desolate capitals, the traveller
sees
Wild tribes, in ruins from the ruins
torn
Hutted like beasts ’mid marble
palaces,
Unknowing what those relics mean,
and whose
The goblets gold-enchased
And images of the gods the broken vaults disclose;

So in the Mid-age from the Past
of Man
The Present was disparted; and they
stood
As on some island, sever’d
from the plan
Of the great world, and the sea’s
twilight flood
Around them, and the monsters of
the unknown;
Blind fancy mix’d
with fact;
Faith in the things unseen sustaining them alone.

Age of extremes and contrasts!—­where
the good
Was more than human in its tenderness
Of chivalry;—­Beauty’s
self the prize of blood,
And evil raging round with wild
excess
Of more than brutal:—­A
disjointed time!
Doubt with Hypocrisy
pair’d,
And purest Faith by folly, childlike, led to crime.

O Florentine, O Master, who alone
From thy loved Vergil till our Shakespeare
came
Didst climb the long steps to the
imperial throne,
With what immortal dyes of angry
flame
Hast blazon’d out the vileness
of the day!
What tints of
perfect love
Rosier than summer rose, etherealize thy lay!

—­Now, as in some new
land when night is deep
The pilgrim halts, nor knows what
round him lies
And wakes with dawn, and finds him
on the steep,
While plains beneath and unguess’d
summits rise,
And stately rivers widening to the
sea,
Cities of men
and towers,
Abash’d for very joy, and gazing fearfully;—­

New worlds, new wisdom, a new birth
of things
On Europe shine, and men know where
they stand:
The sea his western portal open
flings,
And bold Sebastian strikes the flowery
land:
Soon, heaven its secret yields;
the golden sun
Enthrones him
in the midst,
And round his throne man and the planets humbly run.

New learning all! yet fresh from
fountains old,
Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep:
Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards
unroll’d,
And mouldering volumes from monastic
sleep,
Reclad with life by more than magic
art:
Till that old
world renew’d
His youth, and in the past the present own’d
its part.

—­O vision that ye saw,
and hardly saw,
Ye who in Alfred’s path at
Oxford trod,
Or in our London train’d by
studious law
The little-ones of Christ to Him
and God,
Colet and Grocyn!—­Though
the world forget
The labours of
your love,
In loving hearts your names live in their fragrance
yet.

O vision that our happier eyes have
seen!
For not till peace came with Elizabeth
Did those fair maids of holy Hippocrene
Cross the wan waves and draw a northern
breath:
Though some far-echoed strain on
Tuscan lyres
Our Chaucer caught,
and sang
Like her who sings ere dawn has lit his Eastern fires;—­

Page 32

Herald of that first splendour,
when the sky
Was topaz-clear with hope, and life-blood-red
With thoughts of mighty poets, lavishly
Round all the fifty years’
horizon shed:—­
Now in our glades the Aglaian Graces
gleam,
Around our fountains
throng,
And change Ilissus’ banks for Thames and Avon
stream.

Daughters of Zeus and bright Eurynome,
She whose blue waters pave the Aegaean
plain,
Children of all surrounding sky
and sea,
A larger ocean claims you, not in
vain!
Ye who to Helicon from Thessalia
wide
Wander’d
when earth was young,
Come from Libethrion, come; our love, our joy, our
pride!

Ah! since your gray Pierian ilex-groves
Felt the despoiling tread of barbarous
feet,
This land, o’er all, the Delian
leader loves;
Here is your favourite home, your
genuine seat:—­
In these green western isles renew
the throne
Where Grace by
Wisdom shines;
—­We welcome with full hearts, and claim
you for our own!

If, looking at England, one point may be singled out
in that long movement, generalized under the name
of the Renaissance, as critical, it is the introduction
of the Greek and Latin literature:—­which
has remained ever since conspicuously the most powerful
and enlarging element, the most effectively educational,
among all blanches of human study.

In the vale Of fair Aosta; See Anselm’s
youthful vision of the gleaners and the palace of
heaven (Green: History, B. II: ch.
ii).

His Great Work; Roger Bacon’s so-named
Opus Majus: ‘At once,’ says
Whewell, ’the Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum
of the thirteenth century.’ Like Vergil,
Bacon passed at one time for a magician.

That new doctrine; Grocyn was perhaps the first
Englishman who studied Greek under Chalcondylas the
Byzantine at Florence; certainly the first who lectured
on Greek in England. This was in the Hall of
Exeter College, Oxford, in 1491. To him Erasmus
(1499) came to study the language.—­See
the brilliant account of the revival of learning in
Green, Hist. B. V: ch. ii.

The golden sun; Refers to Copernicus; whose
solar system was, however, not published till 1543.

The little-ones; Colet, Dean of S. Paul’s,
founded the school in 1510. ’The bent of
its founder’s mind was shown by the image of
the Child Jesus over the master’s chair, with
the words Hear ye Him graven beneath it’
(Green: B. V: ch. iv).

Fifty years; Between 1570 and 1620 lies almost
all the glorious production of our so-called Elizabethan
period.

From Libethrion;—­Nymphae, noster
amor, Libethrides! . . . What a music is
there in the least little fragment of Vergil’s
exquisite art!

Page 33

MARGARET TUDOR

PROTHALAMION

1503

Love who art above us all,
Guard the treasure on her way,
Flower of England, fair and tall,
Maiden-wise and maiden-gay,
As her northward path she goes;
Daughter of the double rose.

Look with twofold grace on her
Who from twofold root has grown,
Flower of York and Lancaster,
Now to grace another throne,
Rose in Scotland’s garden set,—­
Britain’s only Margaret.

Exile-child from childhood’s bower,
Pledge and bond of Henry’s faith,
James, take home our English flower,
Guard from touch of scorn and skaith;
Bearing, in her slender hands,
Palms of peace to hostile lands.

Safe by southern smiling shires,
Many a city, many a shrine;
By the newly kindled fires
Of the black Northumbrian mine;
Border clans in ambush set;
Carry thou fair Margaret.

—­Land of heath and hill and linn,
Land of mountain-freedom wild,
She in heart to thee is kin,
Tudor’s daughter, Gwynedd’s child!
In her lively lifeblood share
Gwenllian and Angharad fair.

East and West, from Dee to Yare,
Now in equal bonds are wed:
Peace her new-found flower shall wear,
Rose that dapples white with red;
North and South, dissever’d yet,
Join in this fair Margaret!

Ocean round our Britain roll’d,
Sapphire ring without a flaw,
When wilt thou one realm enfold,
One in freedom, one in law?
Will that ancient feud be sped,
Brothers’ blood by brothers shed?

—­Land with freedom’s struggle sore,
Land to whom thy children cling
With a lover’s love and more,
Take the gentle gift we bring!
Pearl in thy crown royal set;
Scotland’s other Margaret.

Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII, married in
1502 to James IV, and afterwards to Lord Angus, was
thus great-grandmother on both sides to James I of
England.

Gwynedd’s child; The Tudors intermarried
with the old royal family of North Wales, in whose
pedigree occur the girl-names Gwenllian and Angharad.

Other Margaret; Sister to Edgar the Etheling,
and wife to Malcolm. Her life and character
are in contrast to the unhappy and unsatisfactory
career of Margaret Tudor, whom I have here only treated
as at once representing and uniting England, Scotland,
and Wales.

LONDON BRIDGE

July 6: 1535

The midnight moaning stream
Draws down its glassy surface through the bridge
That o’er the current casts a tower’d
ridge,
Dark sky-line forms fantastic as a dream;
And cresset watch-lights on the bridge-gate gleam,
Where ’neath the star-lit dome gaunt masts upbuoy
No flag of festive joy,
But blanching spectral heads;—­their heads,
who died
Victims to tyrant-pride,
Martyrs of Faith and Freedom in the day
Of shame and flame and brutal selfish sway.

Page 34

And one in black array
Veiling her Rizpah-misery, to the gate
Comes, and with gold and moving speech sedate
Buys down the thing aloft, and bears away
Snatch’d from the withering wind and ravens’
prey:
And as a mother’s eyes, joy-soften’d,
shed
Tears o’er her young child’s head,
Golden and sweet, from evil saved; so she
O’er this, sad-smilingly,
Mangled and gray, unwarm’d by human breath,
Clasping death’s relic with love passing death.

So clasping now! and so
When death clasps her in turn! e’en in the grave
Nursing the precious head she could not save,
Tho’ through each drop her life-blood yearn’d
to flow
If but for him she might to scaffold go:—­
And O! as from that Hall, with innocent gore
Sacred from roof to floor,
To that grim other place of blood he went—­
What cry of agony rent
The twilight,—­cry as of an Angel’s
pain,—­My father, O my father! . . . and in vain!

Then, as on those who lie
Cast out from bliss, the days of joy come back,
And all the soul with wormwood sweetness rack,
So in that trance of dreadful ecstasy
The vision of her girlhood glinted by:—­
And how the father through their garden stray’d,
And, child with children, play’d,
And teased the rabbit-hutch, and fed the dove
Before him from above
Alighting,—­in his visitation sweet,
Led on by little hands, and eager feet.

Hence among those he stands,
Elect ones, ever in whose ears the wordHe that offends these little ones . . . is
heard,
With love and kisses smiling-out commands,
And all the tender hearts within his hands;
Seeing, in every child that goes, a flower
From Eden’s nursery bower,
A little stray from Heaven, for reverence here
Sent down, and comfort dear:
All care well paid-for by one pure caress,
And life made happy in their happiness.

He too, in deeper lore
Than woman’s in those early days, or yet,—­
Train’d step by step his youthful Margaret;
The wonders of that amaranthine store
Which Hellas and Hesperia evermore
Lavish, to strengthen and refine the race:—­
For, in his large embrace,
The light of faith with that new light combined
To purify the mind:—­
A crystal soul, a heart without disguise,
All wisdom’s lover, and through love, all-wise.

—­O face she ne’er will see,—­
Gray eyes, and careless hair, and mobile lips
From which the shaft of kindly satire slips
Healing its wound with human sympathy;
The heart-deep smile; the tear-concealing glee!
O well-known furrows of the reverend brow!
Familiar voice, that now
She will not hear nor answer any more,—­
Till on the better shore
Where love completes the love in life begun,
And smooths and knits our ravell’d skein in
one!

Page 35

Blest soul, who through life’s course
Didst keep the young child’s heart unstain’d
and whole,
To find again the cradle at the goal,
Like some fair stream returning to its source;—­
Ill fall’n on days of falsehood, greed, and
force!
Base days, that win the plaudits of the base,
Writ to their own disgrace,
With casuist sneer o’erglossing works of blood,
Miscalling evil, good;
Before some despot-hero falsely named
Grovelling in shameful worship unashamed.

—­But they of the great race
Look equably, not caring much, on foe
And fame and misesteem of man below;
And with forgiving radiance on their face,
And eyes that aim beyond the bourn of space,
Seeing the invisible, glory-clad, go up
And drink the absinthine cup,
Fill’d nectar-deep by the dear love of Him
Slain at Jerusalem
To free them from a tyrant worse than this,
Changing brief anguish for the heart of bliss.

Envoy

—­O moaning stream of Time,
Heavy with hate and sin and wrong and woe
As ocean-ward dost go,
Thou also hast thy treasures!—­Life, sublime
In its own sweet simplicity:—­life for love:
Heroic martyr-death:—­
Man sees them not: but they are seen above.

One in black array; Sir T. More’s daughter,
Margaret Roper.

That Hall; Westminster, where More was tried:
That other place; Tower Hill.

The vision of her girlhood; More taught his
own children, and was like a child with them.
He ’would take grave scholars and statesmen
into the garden to see his girls’ rabbit-hutches.
. . . I have given you kisses enough, he wrote
to his little ones, but stripes hardly ever’:
(Green, B. V: ch. ii).

The wonders; See first note to Grocyn at
Oxford.

In his large embrace; More may be said to have
represented the highest aim and effort of the ‘new
learning’ in England. He is the flower
of our Renaissance in genius, wisdom, and beauty of
nature. ‘When ever,’ says Erasmus
in a famous passage, ’did Nature mould a character
more gentle, endearing, and happy, than Thomas More’s?’

AT FOUNTAINS

1539-1862

Blest hour, as on green happy slopes I lie,
Gray walls around and high,
While long-ranged arches lessen on the view,
And one high gracious curve
Of shaftless window frames the limpid blue.

—­God’s altar erst, where wind-set
rowan now
Waves its green-finger’d bough,
And the brown tiny creeper mounts the bole
With curious eye alert,
And beak that tries each insect-haunted hole,

And lives her gentle life from nest to nest,
And dies undispossess’d:
Whilst all the air is quick with noise of birds
Where once the chant went up;
Now musical with a song more sweet than words.

Page 36

Sky-roof’d and bare and deep in dewy sod,
Still ’tis the house of God!
Beauty by desolation unsubdued:—­
And all the past is here,
Thronging with thought this holy solitude.

I see the taper-stars, the altars gay;
And those who crouch and pray;
The white-robed crowd in close monastic stole,
Who hither fled the world
To find the world again within the soul.

Yet here the pang of Love’s defeat, the pride
Of life unsatisfied,
Might win repose or anodyne; here the weak,
Armour’d against themselves,
Exchange true guiding for obedience meek.

Through day, through night, here, in the fragrant
air,
Their hours are struck by prayer;
Freed from the bonds of freedom, the distress
Of choice, on life’s storm-sea
They gaze unharm’d, and know their happiness.

Till o’er this rock of refuge, deem’d
secure,
—­This palace of the poor,
Ascetic luxury, wealth too frankly shown,—­
The royal robber swept
His lustful eye, and seized the prey his own.

—­Ah, calm of Nature! Now thou hold’st
again
Thy sweet and silent reign!
And, as our feverish years their orbit roll,
This pure and cloister’d peace
In its old healing virtue bathes the soul.

1539 is the year when the greater monasteries, amongst
which Fountains in Yorkshire held a prominent place,
were confiscated and ruined by Henry VIII.

The tiny creeper; Certhia Familiaris; the smallest
of our birds after the wren. It belongs to a
class nearly related to the woodpecker.

White-robed; The colour of the Cistercian order,
to which Fountains belonged.

SIR HUGH WILLOUGHBY

1553-4

Two ships upon the steel-blue Arctic
seas
When day was long and night itself
was day,
Forged heavily before the South
West breeze
As to the steadfast star they curved
their way;
Two specks of man, two only signs
of life,
Where with all breathing things white Death keeps
endless strife.

The Northern Cape is sunk:
and to the crew
This zone of sea, with ice-floes
wedged and rough,
Domed by its own pure height of
tender blue,
Seems like a world from the great
world cut off:
While, round the horizon clasp’d,
a ring of white,
Snow-blink from snows unseen, walls them with angry
light.

Now that long day compact of many
days
Breaks up and wanes; and equal night
beholds
Their hapless driftage past uncharted
bays,
And in her chilling, killing arms
enfolds:
While the near stars a thousand
arrowy darts
Bend from their diamond eyes, as the low sun departs.

Or the weird Northern Dawn in idle
play
Mocks their sad souls, now trickling
down the sky
In many-quivering lines of golden
spray,
Then blazing out, an Iris-arch on
high,
With fiery lances fill’d and
feathery bars,
And sheeny veils that hide or half-reveal the stars.

Page 37

A silent spectacle! Yet sounds,
’tis said,
On their forlornness broke; a hissing
cry
Of mockery and wild laugh, as, overhead,
Those blight fantastic squadrons
flaunted by:—­
And that false dawn, long nickering,
died away,
And the Sun came not forth, and Heaven withheld the
day.

O King Hyperion, o’er the
Delphic dale
Reigning meanwhile in glory, Ocean
know
Thine absence, and outstretch’d
an icy veil,
A marble pavement, o’er his
waters blue;
Past the Varangian fiord and Zembla
hoar,
And from Petsora north to dark Arzina’s shore:—­

An iron ridge o’erhung with
toppling snow
And giant beards of icicled cascade:—­
Where, frost-imprison’d as
the long mouths go,
The Good Hope and her mate-ship
lay embay’d;
And those brave crews knew that
all hope was gone;
England be seen no more; no more the living sun.

A store that daily lessens ’neath
their eyes;
A little dole of light and fire
and food:—­
While Night upon them like a vampyre
lies
Bleaching the frame and thinning
out the blood;
And through the ships the frost-bit
timbers groan,
And the Guloine prowls round, with dull heart-curdling
moan.

Then sometimes on the soul, far
off, how far!
Came back the shouting crowds, the
cannon-roar,
The latticed palace glittering like
a star,
The buoyant Thames, the green, sweet
English shore,
The heartful prayers, the fireside
blaze and bliss,
The little faces bright, and woman’s last, last
kiss.

—­O yet, for all their
misery, happy souls!
Happy in faith and love and fortitude:—­
For you, one thought of England
dear controls
All shrinking of the flesh at death
so rude!
Though long at rest in that far
Arctic grave,
True sailor hero hearts, van of our bravest brave.

And one by one the North King’s
searching lance
Touch’d, and they stiffen’d
at their task, and died;
And their stout leader glanced a
farewell glance;
‘God is as close by sea as
land,’ he cried,
’In His own light not nearer
than this gloom,’—­
And look’d as one who o’er the mountains
sees his home.

Home!—­happy sound of
vanish’d happiness!
—­But when the unwilling
sun crept up again,
And loosed the sea from winter and
duresse,
The seal-wrapt race that roams the
Lapland main
Saw in Arzina, wondering, fearing
more,
The tatter’d ships, in snows entomb’d
and vaulted o’er:

And clomb the decks, and found the
gallant crew,
As forms congeal’d to stone,
where frozen fate
Took each man in his turn, and gently
slew:—­
Nor knew the heroic chieftain, as
he sate,
English through every fibre, in
his place,
The smile of duty done upon the steadfast face.

Sir Hugh Willoughby, in the Bona Esperanza,
with two other vessels, sailed May 10, 1553, saluting
the palace of Greenwich is they passed. By September
18 he, with one consort, reached the harbour of Arzina,
where all perished early in 1554. His will,
dated in January of that year, was found when the
ships were discovered by the Russians soon after.

Page 38

Willoughby has been taken here as the representative
of the great age of British naval adventure and exploration.

Arzina is placed near the western headland
of the White Sea, east of the Waranger Fiord, and
west of Nova Zembla and the mouth of the Petchora.

CROSSING SOLWAY

May 16: 1568

Blow from the North, thou bitter North wind,
Blow over the western bay,
Where Nith and Eden and Esk run in
And fight with the salt sea spray,
And the sun shines high through the sailing sky
In the freshness of blue Mid-may.

Blow North-North-West, and hollow the sails
Of a Queen who slips over the sea
As a hare from the hounds; and her covert afar;
And now she can only flee;
And death before and the sisterly shore
That smiles perfidiously.

O Mid-may freshness about her cheek
And piercing her poor attire,
The sting of defeat thou canst not allay,
The fever of heart and the fire,
The death-despair for the days that were,
And famine of vain desire!

—­On Holyrood stairs an iron-heel’d
clank
Came up in the gloaming hour:
And iron fingers have bursten the bar
Of the palace innermost bower:
And fiend-like on her the Douglas and Ker
And spectral Ruthven glower.

She hears the shriek as the Morton horde
Hurry the victim beneath;
And she feels their dead man’s grasp on her
skirt
In the frenzy-terror of death;
And the dastard King at her bosom cling
With a serpent’s poison-breath.

O fair girl Queen, well weep for the friend
To his faith too faithful and thee;
For a brother’s hypocrite tears; for the flight
To the Castle set by the sea;—­
Where thy father’s tomb lay and gaped in the
gloom
’Twere better for thee to be!

O better at rest where the crooning dove
May sing requiem o’er thy bed,
Sweet Robin aflame with love’s sign on his breast
With quick light footstep tread;
While over the sod the Birds of God
Their guardian feathers outspread!

Too womanly sweet, too womanly frail,
Alone in thy faith and thy need;
In the homeless home, in the poisonous air
Of spite and libel and greed;
Mid perfidy’s net thy pathway is set,
And thy feet in the pitfalls bleed.

—­O lightnings, not lightnings of Heaven,
that flare
Through the desolate House in the Field!
Craft that the Fiend had envied in vain;
Till the terrible Day unreveal’d,—­
Till the Angels rejoice at the Verdict-voice,
And Mary’s pardon is seal’d!

As a bird from the mesh of the fowler freed
With wild wing shatters the air,
From shelter to shelter, betray’d, she flees,
Or lured to some treacherous lair,
And the vulture-cry of the enemy nigh,
And the heavens dark with despair!

Bright lily of France, by the storm stricken low,
A sunbeam thou seest through the shade
Where Order and Peace are throned ’neath the
smile
Of a royal sisterly Maid:—­
For hope in the breast of the girl has her nest,
Ever trusting, and ever betray’d.

Page 39

Brave womanly heart that, beholding the shore,
Beholds her own grave unaware,—­
Though the days to come their shame should unveil
Yet onward she still would dare!
Though the meadows smile with statesmanly guile,
And the cuckoo’s call is a snare!

Turn aside, O Queen, from the cruel land,
From the greedy shore turn away;
From shame upon shame:—­But most shame for
those
On their passionate captive who play
With a subtle net, hope enwoven with threat,
Hung out to tempt her astray!

Poor scape-goat of crimes, where,—­her part
what it may,—­
So tortured, so hunted to die,
Foul age of deceit and of hate,—­on her
head
Least stains of gore-guiltiness lie;
To the hearts of the just her blood from the dust
Not in vain for mercy will cry.

Poor scape-goat of nations and faiths in their strife
So cruel,—­and thou so fair!
Poor girl!—­so, best, in her misery named,—­
Discrown’d of two kingdoms, and bare;
Not first nor last on this one was cast
The burden that others should share.

—­When the race is convened at the great
assize
And the last long trumpet-call,
If Woman ’gainst Man, in her just appeal,
At the feet of the Judge should fall,
O the cause were secure;—­the sentence sure!
—­But she will forgive him all!—­

O keen heart-hunger for days that were;
Last look at a vanishing shore!
In two short words all bitterness summ’d,
That Has been and Nevermore!
Nor with one caress will Mary bless,
Nor look on the babe she bore!

Blow, bitter wind, with a cry of death,
Blow over the western bay:
The sunshine is gone from the desolate girl,
And before is the doomster-day,
And the saw-dust red with the heart’s-blood
shed
In the shambles of Fotheringay.

Mary of Scotland is one of the five or six figures
in our history who rouse an undying personal interest.
Volumes have been and will be written on her:—­yet
if we put aside the distorting mists of national and
political and theological partisanship, the common
laws of human nature will give an easy clue to her
conduct and that of her enemies.

Her flight from Scotland, as the turning-point in
Mary’s unhappy and pathetic career, has been
here chosen for the moment whence to survey it.

On Holyrood stairs; Riccio was murdered on
March 9, 1566. Mary’s exclamation when
she heard of his death next day, No more tears;
I will think upon a revenge, is the sufficient
explanation,—­in a great degree should be
the sufficient justification, with those who still
hold her an accomplice in the death of Darnley and
the marriage with Bothwell,—­(considering
the then lawless state of Scotland, the complicity
of the leading nobles, the hopelessness of justice)—­of
her later conduct whilst Queen.

The friend; In Riccio’s murder the main
determinant was his efficiency in aiding Mary towards
a Roman Catholic reaction, which might have deprived
a large body of powerful nobles of the church lands.
The death of Riccio (Mary’s most faithful friend)
prevented this: the death of Darnley became necessary
to secure the position gained.

Page 40

A brother’s hypocrite tears; Murray,
in whose interest Riccio was murdered, and whose privity
to the murder (as afterwards to that of Darnley) is
reasonably, though indirectly, proved, affected to
shed tears on seeing his sister. Next day she
learned the details of the plot, and her half-brother’s
share in it.

The flight; Mary then fled by a secret passage
from Holyrood Palace through the Abbey Church, the
royal tombs which had been broken open by the revolutionary
mob of 1559.

The Castle; Dunbar.

Till the terrible Day unreveal’d; See
Appendix A.

SIDNEY AT ZUTPHEN

October 2: 1586

1

Where Guelderland outspreads
Her green wide water-meads
Laced by the silver of the parted Rhine;
Where round the horizon low
The waving millsails go,
And poplar avenues stretch their pillar’d
line;
That morn a clinging mist uncurl’d
Its folds o’er South-Fen town, and blotted out
the world.

2

There, as the gray dawn broke,
Cloked by that ghost-white cloke,
The fifty knights of England sat in steel;
Each man all ear, for eye
Could not his nearest spy;
And in the mirk’s dim hiding heart they feel,
—­Feel more than hear,—­the
signal sound
Of tramp and hoof and wheel, and guns that bruise
the ground.

3

—­Sudden, the mist gathers up like a curtain,
the theatre clear; Stage of unequal conflict, and
triumph purchased too dear! Half our boot treasures
of gallanthood there, with axe and with glaive, One
against ten,—­what of that?—­We
are ready for glory or grave! There, Spain and
her thousands nearing, with lightning-tongued weapons
of war;—­ Ebro’s swarthy sons, and
the bands from Epirus afar; Crescia, Gonzaga, del
Vasto,—­world-famous names of affright,
Veterans of iron and blood, insatiate engines of fight:—­
But ours were Norris and Essex and Stanley and Willoughby
grim, And the waning Dudley star, and the star that
will never be dim, Star of Philip the peerless,—­and
now at height of his noon, Astrophel!—­not
for thyself but for England extinguish’d too
soon!

4

Red walls of Zutphen behind; before them, Spain in
her might:—­ O! ’tis not war, but
a game of heroic boyish delight! For on, like
a bolt-head of steel, go the fifty, dividing their
way, Through and over the brown mail-shirts,—­Farnese’s
choicest array; Over and through, and the curtel-axe
flashes, the plumes in their pride Sink like the larch
to the hewer, a death-mown avenue wide: While
the foe in his stubbornness flanks them and bars them,
with merciless aim Shooting from musket and saker
a scornful death-tongue of flame. As in an autumn
afar, the Six Hundred in Chersonese hew’d Their
road through a host, for their England and honour’s
sake wasting their blood, Foolishness wiser than
wisdom!—­So these, since Azincourt morn,
First showing the world the calm open-eyed rashness
of Englishmen born!

Page 41

5

Foes ere the cloud went up, black Norris and Stanley
in one Pledge iron hands and kiss swords, each his
mate’s, in the face of the sun, Warm with the
generous wine of the battle; and Willoughby’s
might To the turf bore Crescia, and lifted again,—­knight
honouring knight; All in the hurry and turmoil:—­where
North, half-booted and rough, Launch’d on the
struggle, and Sidney struck onward, his cuisses thrown
off, Rash over-courage of poet and youth!—­while
the memories, how At the joust long syne She look’d
on, as he triumph’d, were hot on his brow,
’Stella! mine own, my own star!’—­and
he sigh’d:—­and towards him a flame
Shot its red signal; a shriek!—­and the viewless
messenger came; Found the unguarded gap, the approach
left bare to the prey, Where through the limb to the
life the death-stroke shatter’d a way.

6

—­Astrophel!
England’s pride!
O stroke that, when he died,
Smote through the realm,—­our best, our
fairest ta’en!
For now the wound accurst
Lights up death’s fury-thirst;—­
Yet the allaying cup, in all that pain,
Untouch’d, untasted he gives o’er
To one who lay, and watch’d with eyes that craved
it more:—­

7

‘Take it,’ he
said, ’’tis thine;
Thy need is more than mine’;—­
And smiled as one who looks through death to life:
—­Then pass’d, true heart
and brave,
Leal from birth to grave:—­
For that curse-laden roar of mortal strife,
With God’s own peace ineffable fill’d,—­
In that eternal Love all earthly passion still’d.

In 1585 Elizabeth, who was then aiding the United
Provinces in their resistance to Spain, sent Sir Philip
Sidney (born 1554) as governor of the fortress of
Flushing in Zealand. The Earl of Leicester, chosen
by the Queen’s unhappy partiality to command
the English force, named Sidney (his nephew) General
of the horse. He marched thence to Zutphen in
Guelderland, a town besieged by the Spaniards, in hopes
of destroying a strong reinforcement which they were
bringing in aid of the besiegers. The details
of the rash and heroic charge which followed may be
read in Motley’s History of the United Netherlands,
ch. ix.

St. 1 Guelderland; in this province the Rhine
divides before entering the sea: ’gliding
through a vast plain.’—­South-Fen;
Zutphen, on the Yssel (Rhine).

St. 3 The bands from Epirus; Crescia, the Epirote
chief, commanded a body of Albanian cavalry.—­The
waning Dudley star; Leicester, who was near the
end of his miserable career.—­Astrophel;
Sidney celebrated his love for Penelope Devereux,
Lady Rich, in the series of Sonnets and Lyrics named
Astrophel and Stella:—­posthumously
published in 1591.—­After, or with Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, this series seems to me to offer the most
powerful picture of the passion of love in the whole
range of our poetry.

St. 4 Saker; early name for field-piece.—­The
Six Hundred; The Crimea in ancient days was named
Chersonesus Taurica.

Page 42

St. 5 Black Norris; had been at variance with
Sir W. Stanley before the engagement. Morris
was one of twelve gallant brothers, whose complexion
followed that of their mother, named by Elizabeth ’her
own crow.’—­North; was lying
bedrid from a wound in the leg, but could not resist
volunteering at Zutphen, and rode up ’with one
boot on and one boot off.’—­Cuisses;

I saw young Harry, with his beaver
on,
His cuisses on his thighs:
(Henry IV, Part I: A. iv: S. i):—­

Sidney flung off his ’in a fit of chivalrous
extravagance.’—­At the joust;
In Sonnets 41 and 53 of Astrophel and Stella
Sidney describes how the sudden sight of his lady-love
dazzled him as he rode in certain tournaments.
In Son. 69 he cries:

I, I, O, I, may say that she is
mine.

ELIZABETH AT TILBURY

September: 1588

Let them come, come never so proudly,
O’er the green waves as giants ride;
Silver clarions menacing loudly,
‘All the Spains’ on their banners
wide;
High on deck of the gilded galleys
Our light sailers they scorn below:—­
We will scatter them, plague, and shatter them,
Till their flag hauls down to their foe!
For our oath we swear
By the name we bear,
By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—­
Her’s ever and her’s still, come life,
come death:—­
God save Elizabeth!

Sidonia, Recalde, and Leyva
Watch from their Castles in swarthy scorn,
Lords and Princes by Philip’s favour;—­
We by birthright are noble born!
Freemen born of the blood of freemen,
Sons of Crecy and Flodden are we!
We shall sunder them, fire, and plunder them,—­
English boats on an English sea!
And our oath we swear,
By the name we bear,
By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—­
Her’s ever and her’s still, come life,
come death!
God save Elizabeth!

Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins, and
Howard,
Raleigh, Cavendish, Cecil, and Brooke,
Hang like wasps by the flagships tower’d,
Sting their way through the thrice-piled oak:—­
Let them range their seven-mile crescent,
Giant galleons, canvas wide!
Ours will harry them, board, and carry them,
Plucking the plumes of the Spanish pride.
For our oath we swear
By the name we bear,
By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—­
Her’s ever and her’s still, come life,
come death!
God save Elizabeth!

—­Hath God risen in wrath
and scatter’d?
Have His tempests smote them in scorn?
Past the Orcades, dumb and tatter’d,
’Mong sea-beasts do they drift forlorn?
We were as lions hungry for battle;
God has made our battle His own!
God has scatter’d them, sunk, and shatter’d
them:
Give the glory to Him alone!
While our oath we swear,
By the name we bear,
By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—­
Her’s ever and her’s still, come life,
come death!
God save Elizabeth!

Page 43

AT BEMERTON

1630-1633

Sick with the strife of tongues, the blustering hate
Of frantic Party raving o’er the realm,
Sonorous insincerities of debate,
And jealous factions snatching at the helm,
And Out o’er-bidding In with graceless strife,
Selling the State for votes:—­O happy fields,
I cried, where Herbert, by the world misprized,
Found in his day the life
That no unrest or disappointment yields,
Vergilian vision here best realized!

His memory is Peace: and peace is here;—­
The eternal lullaby of the level brook,
With bird-like chirpings mingled, glassy-clear;
The narrow pathway to the yew-clipp’d nook;
Trim lawn, familiar to the pensive feet;
The long gray walls he raised:—­A household
nest
Where Hope and firm-eyed Faith and heavenly Love
Made human love more sweet;
While,—­earth’s rare visitant from
the choirs above,—­
Urania’s holy steps the cottage blest.

Peace there:—­and peace upon the house of
God,
The little road-side church that room-like stands
Crouching entrench’d in slopes of daisy sod,
And duly deck’d by Herbert-honouring hands:—­
Cell of detachment! Shrine to which the heart
Withdraws, and all the roar of life is still;
Then sinks into herself, and finds a shrine
Within the shrine apart:
Alone with God, as on the Arabian hill
Man knelt in vision to the All-divine!

—­Thrice happy they,—­and know
their happiness,—­
Who read the soul’s star-orbit Heaven-ward clear;
Not roving comet-like through doubt and guess,
But ’neath their feet tread nescient pride and
fear;
Scan the unseen with sober certainty,
God’s hill above Himalah;—­Love green
earth
With deeper, truer love, because the blue
Of Heaven around they see;—­
Who in the death-gasp hail man’s second birth,
And yield their loved ones with a brief adieu!

—­Thee, too, esteem I happy in thy death,
Poet! while yet peace was, and thou might’st
live
Unvex’d in thy sweet reasonable faith,
The gracious creed that knows how to forgive:—­
Not narrowing God to self,—­the common bane
Of sects, each man his own small oracle;
Not losing innerness in external rite;
A worship pure and plain,
Yet liberal to man’s heaven-imbreathed delight
In all that sound can hint, or beauty tell.

A golden moderation!—­which the wise
Then highest rate, when fury-factions roar,
And folly’s choicest fools the most despise:—­
—­O happy Poet! laid in peace before
Rival intolerants each ’gainst other flamed,
And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace
Of life before that sad illiterate gloom
Puritan, fled ashamed:
While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face,
Titanic features on the horizon loom!

George Herbert’s brief career as a parish priest
was passed at Bemerton, a pretty village near Salisbury
in the vale of the Avon. His parsonage, with
its garden running down to the stream, and the little
church across the road in which he lies buried, remain
comparatively unchanged (March 26, 1880) since he
lived and mused and wrote his Poems within these precincts.
The justly-famous Temple was published shortly
after his death by his friend Nicholas Ferrar.

Page 44

Arabian hill; Mount Sinai.

Titanic features; See A Churchyard in Oxfordshire,
st. iii.

PRINCESS ANNE

November 5: 1640

Harsh words have been utter’d and written on
her, Henrietta the Queen: She was young in a
difficult part, on a cruel and difficult scene:—­
Was it strange she should fail? that the King overmuch
should bow down to her will? —­So
of old with the women, God bless them!—­it
was, so will ever be still! Rash in counsel
and rash in courage, she aided and marr’d The
shifting tides of the fight, the star of the Stuarts
ill-starr’d. In her the false Florentine
blood,—­in him the bad strain of the Guise;
Suspicion against her and hate, all that malice can
forge and devise;—­ As a bird by the fowlers
o’ernetted, she shuffles and changes her ground;
No wile unlawful in war, and the foe unscrupulous round!
Woman-like overbelieving Herself and the Cause and
the Man, Fights with two-edged intrigue, suicidal,
plan upon plan; Till the law of this world had its
way, and she fled,—­like a frigate unsail’d,
Unmasted, unflagg’d,—­to her land;
and the strength of the stronger prevail’d.

But it was not thus, not thus, in the years of
thy springtide, O Queen, When thy children came in
their beauty, and all their future unseen: When
the kingdom had wealth and peace, one smile o’er
the face of the land: England, too happy, if
thou could’st thy happiness understand!
As those over Etna who slumber, and under them rankles
the fire. At her side was the gallant King, her
first-love, her girlhood’s desire, And around
her, best jewels and dearest to brighten the steps
of the throne, Three golden heads, three fair little
maids, in their nursery shone. ‘As the
mother, so be the daughters,’ they say:—­nor
could mother wish more For her own, than men saw
in the Queen’s, ere the rosebud-dawning was
o’er, Heart-wise and head-wise, a joy to behold,
as they knelt for her kiss,—­ Best crown
of a woman’s life, her true vocation and bliss!—­
But the flowers were pale and frail, and the mother
watch’d them with dread, As the sunbeams play’d
round the room on each gay, glistening head.

Anne in that garden of childhood grew nearest Elizabeth:
she
Tenderly tended and loved her, a babe with a babe
on her knee:
Slight and white from the cradle was Anne; a floweret
born
Rathe, out of season, a rose that peep’d out
when the hedge was in thorn.
‘Why should it be so with us?’ thought
Elizabeth oft; for in her
The soul ’gainst the body protesting, was but
more keenly astir:
’As saplings stunted by forest around o’ershading,
we two:
What work for our life, my mother,’ she said,
’is left us to do?
Or is’t from the evil to come, the days without
pleasure, that God
In mercy would spare us, over our childhood outstretching
the rod?’
—­So she, from her innocent heart; in all
things seeing the best

Page 45

With the wholesome spirit of childhood; to God submitting
the rest:
Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook
drear;
Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even
a tear!
Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day
upon day,
As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the
cough has its way.
And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe
air of the vale
Stay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science
fail.
Then the little footsteps are faint, and a child may
take her with ease;
As the flowers a babe flings down she is spread on
Elizabeth’s knees,
Slipping back to the cradle-life, in her wasting weakness
and pain:
And the sister prays and smiles and watches the sister
in vain.

So she watch’d by the bed all night, and
the lights were yellow and low, And a cold blue blink
shimmer’d up from the park that was sheeted in
snow: And the frost of the passing hour, when
souls from the body divide, The Sarsar-wind of the
dawn, crept into the palace, and sigh’d.
And the child just turn’d her head towards Elizabeth
there as she lay, And her little hands came together
in haste, as though she would pray; And the words
wrestled in her for speech that the fever-dry mouth
cannot frame, And the strife of the soul on the delicate
brow was written in flame: And Elizabeth call’d
’O Father, why does she look at me so?
Will it soon be better for Anne? her face is all in
a glow’:—­ But with womanly speed
and heed is the mother beside her, and slips Her arm
’neath the failing head, and moistens the rose
of the lips, Pale and sweet as the wild rose of June,
and whispers to pray To the Father in heaven, ‘the
one she likes best, my baby, to say’: And
the soul hover’d yet o’er the lips, as
a dove when her pinions are spread, And the light
of the after-life came again in her eyes, and she said;
’For my long prayer it is not time; for my short
one I think I have breath; Lighten mine eyes,
O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of death.’
—­O! into life, fair child, as she pray’d,
her innocence slept! ‘It is better for
her,’ they said:—­and knelt, and kiss’d
her, and wept.

In her; Henrietta’s mother was by birth
Mary de’ Medici; the great-grandmother of Charles
was Mary of Guise.

‘With Charles I,’ says Ranke, ’nothing
was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions
in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in
which his declarations, if always true in the sense
he privately gave them, were only a hair’s-breadth
removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.’—­Whether
traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of
Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish
marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty
is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character
of Charles I.—­Yet, whilst noting it, candid
students will regretfully confess that the career
of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades
of bad faith, darker and more numerous.

Page 46

When the kingdom; See Clarendon’s description
of England during this period, ’enjoying the
greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity
that any people in any age for so long time together
have been blessed with.’

Three golden heads; Mary, the second child
of Charles and Henrietta, was born Nov. 4, 1631:
Elizabeth, Dec. 28, 1635: Anne, Mar. 17, 1637.
The last two were feeble from infancy. Consumption
soon showed itself in Anne, and her short life, passed
at Richmond, closed in November, 1640. For her
last words, we are indebted to Fuller, who adds:
’This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.’

The affection and care of the royal parents is well
attested. ’Their arrival,’ when
visiting the nursery, ’was the signal of a general
rejoicing.’

In the latter portion of this piece I have ventured,
it will be seen, on an ideal treatment. The
main facts, and the words of the dear child, are historical:—­for
the details I appeal to any mother who has suffered
similar loss whether they could have been much otherwise.

Not seeing; See the Captive Child.

The frost; It is noticed that death, the Sarsar-wind
of Southey’s Thalaba, often occurs at
the turn between night and day, when the atmosphere
is wont to be at the coldest.

AFTER CHALGROVE FIGHT

June 18: 1643

Flags crape-smother’d and
arms reversed,
With one sad volley lay him to rest:
Lay him to rest where he may not see
This England he loved like a lover accursed
By lawlessness masking as liberty,
By the despot in Freedom’s panoply drest:—­
Bury him, ere he be made duplicity’s tool and
slave,
Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!
Bury him, bury him, bury him
With his face downward!

Chalgrove! Name of patriot
pain!
O’er thy fresh fields that summer pass’d
The brand of war’s red furnace blast,
Till heaven’s soft tears wash’d out
the blackening stain;—­
Wash’d out and wept;—­But could
not so restore
England’s gallant son:
Ere the fray was done
The stately head bow’d down; shatter’d;
his warfare o’er.

Bending to the saddle-bow
With leaden arm that idle hangs,
Faint with the lancing torture-pangs,
He drops the rein; he lets the battle go:—­
There, where the wife of his first love he woo’d
Turning for retreat;—­
Memories bitter-sweet
Through death’s fast-rising mist in youth’s
own light renew’d.

Then, as those who drown,
perchance,
And all their years, a waking dream,
Flash pictured by in lightning gleam,
His childhood home appears, the mother’s
glance,
The hearth-side smile; the fragrance of the fields:
—­Now, war’s iron knell
Wakes the hounds of hell,
Whilst o’er the realm her scourge the rushing
Fury wields!

Doth he now the day lament
When those who stemm’d despotic might
O’erstrode the bounds of law and right,
And through the land the torch of ruin sent?
Or that great rival statesman as he stood
Lion-faced and grim,
Hath he sight of him,
Strafford—­the meteor-axe—­the
fateful Hill of Blood?

Page 47

—­Heroes both! by
passion led,
In days perplex’d ’tween new and
old,
Each at his will the realm to mould;
This, basing sovereignty on the single head,
This, on the many voices of the Hall:—­
Each for his own creed
Prompt to die at need:
His side of England’s shield each saw, and took
for all.

Heroes both! For Order
one
And one for Freedom dying!—­We
May judge more justly both, than ye
Could, each, his brother, ere the strife was done!
—­O Goddess of that even scale and weight,
In whose awful eyes
Truest mercy lies,
This hero-dirge to thee I vow and dedicate!

—­Slanting now,—­the
foe is by,—­
Through Hazeley mead the warrior goes,
And hardly fords the brook that flows
Bearing to Thame its cool, sweet, summer-cry.
Here take thy rest; here bind the broken heart!
By death’s mercy-doom
Hid from ills to come,
Great soul, and greatly vex’d, Hampden!—­in
peace depart!

In the heart of the fields he loved and the hills,
Look your last, and lay him to rest,
With the faded flower, the wither’d
grass;
Where the blood-face of war and
the myriad ills
Of England dear like phantoms pass
And touch not the soul that is with
the Blest.
Bury him in the night and peace of the holy grave,
Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!
Bury him, bury
him, bury him
With
his face downward!

John Hampden met his death at Chalgrove in an attempt
to check the raids which Prince Rupert was making
from Oxford. Struck at the onset in the shoulder
by two carabine balls, he rode off before the action
was ended by Hazeley towards Thame, finding it impossible
to reach Pyrton, the home of his father-in-law.
The body was carried to his own house amid the woods
and hills of the Chiltern country, and buried in the
church close by.

With his face downward; This was the dying
request of some high-minded Spaniard of old, unwilling,
even in the grave, as it were, to look on the misfortunes
of his country.

O’erstrode the bounds; ‘After every
allowance has been made,’ says Hallam, speaking
of the Long Parliament from a date so early as August,
1641, ’he must bring very heated passions to
the records of those times, who does not perceive
in the conduct of that body a series of glaring violations,
not only of positive and constitutional, but of those
higher principles which are paramount to all immediate
policy’: (Const. Hist. ch.
ix).

The axe; A clear and impartial sketch of Stafford’s
trial will be found in Ranke (B. viii): who deals
dispassionately and historically with an event much
obscured by declamation in popular narratives.
Even in Hallam’s hand the balance seems here
to waver a little.

Heroes both;—­Each his side;
See Appendix B.

A CHURCHYARD IN OXFORDSHIRE

Page 48

September: 1643

Sweet air and fresh; glades yet unsear’d by
hand
Of Midas-finger’d Autumn, massy-green;
Bird-haunted nooks between,
Where feathery ferns, a fairy palmglove, stand,
An English-Eastern band:—­
While e’en the stealthy squirrel o’er
the grass
Beside me to the beech-clump dares to pass:—­
In this still precinct of the happy dead,
The sanctuary of silence,—­Blessed they!
I cried, who ’neath the gray
Peace of God’s house, each in his mounded bed
Sleep safe, nor reck how the great world runs on;
Peasant with noble here alike unknown.

Unknown, unnamed beneath one turf they sleep,
Beneath one sky, one heaven-uplifted sign
Of love assured, divine:
While o’er each mound the quiet mosses creep,
The silent dew-pearls weep:
—­Fit haven-home for thee, O gentlest heart
Of Falkland! all unmeet to find thy part
In those tempestuous times of canker’d hate
When Wisdom’s finest touch, and, by her side,
Forbearance generous-eyed
To fix the delicate balance of the State
Were needed;—­King or Nation, which should
hold
Supreme supremacy o’er the kingdoms old.

—­God’s heroes, who? . . . Not
most, or likeliest, he
Whom iron will cramps to one narrow road,
Driving him like a goad
Till all his heart decrees seem God’s decree;
That worst hypocrisy
When self cheats self, and conscience at the wheel
Herself is steer’d by passion’s blindfold
zeal;
A nether-world archangel! Through whose eyes
Flame the red mandates of remorseless might;
A gloom of lurid light
That holds no commerce with the crystal skies;
Like those rank fires that o’er the fen-land
flee,
Or on the mast-head sign the wrath to be.

As o’er that ancient weird Arlesian plain
Where Zeus hail’d boulder-stones on the giant
crew,
And changed to stone, or slew,
No bud may burgeon in Spring’s gracious rain,
No blade of grass or grain:
—­So bare, so scourged, a prey to chaos
cast
The wisest despot leaves his realm at last!
Though for the land he toil’d with iron will,
Earnest to reach persuasion’s goal through power,
The fruit without the flower!
And pray’d and wrestled to charm good from ill;
Waking perchance, or not, in death,—­to
find
Man fights a losing fight who fights mankind!

And as who in the Theban avenue,
Sphinx ranged by Sphinx, goes awestruck, nor may read
That ancient awful creed
Closed in their granite calm:—­so dim the
clue,
So tangled, tracking through
That labyrinthine soul which, day by day
Changing, yet kept one long imperious way:
Strong in his weakness; confident, yet forlorn;
Waning and waxing; diamond-keen, or dull,
As that star Wonderful,
Mira, for ever, dying and reborn:—­
Blissful or baleful, yet a Power throughout,
Throned in dim altitude o’er the common rout.

Page 49

Alas, great Chief! The pity of it!—­For
he
Lay on his unlamented bier; his life
Wreck’d on that futile strife
To wed things alien by heaven’s decree,
Sword-sway with liberty:—­
Coercing, not protecting;—­for the Cause
Smiting with iron heel on England’s laws:
—­Intolerant tolerance! Soul that
could not trust
Its finer instincts; self-compell’d to run
The blood-path once begun,
And murder mercy with a sad ‘I must!’
Great lion-heart by guile and coarseness marr’d;
By his own heat a hero warp’d and scarr’d.

Despot despite himself!—­And when the cry
Moan’d up from England, dungeon’d in that
drear
Sectarian atmosphere,
With glory he gilt her chains; in Spanish sky
Flaunting the Red Cross high;—­
Wars, just or unjust, ill or well design’d,
Urged with the will that masters weak mankind.
—­God’s hammer Thou!—­not
hero!—­Forged to break
The land,—­salve wounds with wounds, heal
force by force;
Sword-surgeon keen and coarse:—­
To all who worship power for power’s own sake,—­
Strength for itself,—­Success, the vulgar
test,—­
Fit idol of bent knee, and servile breast!

—­O in the party plaudits of the crowd
Glorious, if this be glory!—­o’er
that shout
A small still voice breathes out
With subtle sweetness silencing the loud
Hoarse vaunting of the proud,—­
A song of exaltation for the vale,
And how the mountain from his height shall fail!
How God’s true heroes, since this earth began,
Go sackcloth-clad through scourge and sword and scorn,
Crown’d with the bleeding thorn,
Down-trampled by man’s heel as foes to man,
And whispering Eli, Eli! as they die,—­
Martyrs of truth and Saint Humility.

These conquer in their fall: Persuasion flies
Wing’d, from their grave: The hearts of
men are turn’d
To worship what they burn’d:
Owning the sway of Love’s long-suffering eyes,
Love’s sweet self-sacrifice;
The might of gentleness; the subduing force
Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course
Gliding;—­not torrent-like with fury spilt,
Impetuous, o’er Himalah’s rifted side,
To ravage blind and wide,
And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;—­
Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and lea
In tranquil transit to the eternal sea.

—­Children of Light!—­If, in the
slow-paced course
Of vital change, your work seem incomplete,
Your conquest-hour defeat,
Won by mild compromise, by the invisible force
That owns no earthly source;
Yet to all time your gifts to man endure,
God being with you, and the victory sure!
For though o’er Gods the Giants in the course
May lord it, Strength o’er Beauty; yet the Soul
Immortal, clasps the goal;
Fair Wisdom triumphs by her inborn force:
—­Thus far on earth! . . . But, ah!—­from
mortal sight
The crowning glory veils itself in light!

Page 50

Envoy

—­Seal’d of that holy band,
Rest here, beneath the foot-fall hushing sod,
Wrapt in the peace of God,
While summer burns above thee; while the land
Disrobes; till pitying snow
Cover her bareness; till fresh Spring-winds blow,
And the sun-circle rounds itself again:—­
Whilst England cries in vain
For thy wise temperance, Lucius!—­But thine
ear
The violent-impotent fever-restless cry,
The faction-yells of triumph, will not hear:
—­Only the thrush on high
And wood-dove’s moaning sweetness make reply.

Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, may perhaps
be defined as at once the most poetically chivalrous
and the most philosophically moderate amongst all
who took part in the pre-restoration struggles.
He was killed in the royal army at the first battle
of Newbury, Sep. 20, 1643, aged but 33 years, and
buried, without mark or memorial, in the church of
Great Tew (North Oxfordshire), the manor of which he
owned.

English Eastern; The common brake-fern and
its allies seem to betray tropical sympathies by their
late appearance and sensitiveness to autumnal frost.

That Arlesian plain; Now named the Crau.
It lies between Aries and the sea—­a bare
and malarious tract of great size covered with shingle
and boulders. Aeschylus describes it as a ‘snow-shower
of round stones,’ which Zeus rained down in
aid of Heracles, who was contending with the Ligurians.

Mira; A star in the Whale, conspicuous
for its singular and rapid changes of apparent size.

The Cause; After passing through several phases
this word, in Cromwell’s mouth, with the common
logic of tyranny, became simply a synonym for personal
rule.

Smiting with iron heel; The terrorism of the
Protector’s government, and the almost universal
hatred which it inspired, are powerfully painted by
Hallam. ’To govern according to law may
sometimes be an usurper’s wish, but can seldom
be in his power. The protector abandoned all
thought of it. . . . All illusion was now (1655)
gone, as to the pretended benefits of the civil war.
It had ended in a despotism, compared to which all
the illegal practices of former kings, all that had
cost Charles his life and crown, appeared as dust in
the balance.’

The blood-path; The trials under which Gerard
and Vowel were executed in 1654, Slingsby and Hewit
in 1658, are the most flagrant instances of Cromwell’s
perversion of justice, and contempt for the old liberties
of England. But they do not stand alone.

Guile and coarseness; ’A certain coarse
good nature and affability that covered the want of
conscience, honour, and humanity: quick in passion,
but not vindictive, and averse to unnecessary crimes,’
is the deliberate summing-up of Hallam,—­in
the love of liberty inferior to none of our historians,
and eminent above all for courageous impartiality,—­iustissimus
unus.

Page 51

MARSTON MOOR

O, summer-high that day the sun
His chariot drove o’er Marston wold:
A rippling sea of amber wheat
That floods the moorland vale with gold.

With harvest light the valley laughs,
The sheaves in mellow sunshine sleep;
—­Too rathe the crop, too red the swathes
Ere night the scythe of Death shall reap!

Then thick and fast o’er all the moor
The crimson’d sabre-lightnings fly;
And thick and fast the death-bolts dash,
And thunder-peals to peals reply.

Where Evening arched her fiery dome
Went up the roar of mortal foes:—­
Then o’er a deathly peace the moon
In silver silence sailing rose.

Sweet hour, when heaven is nearest home,
And children’s kisses close the day!
O disaccord with nature’s calm,
Unholy requiem of the fray!

White maiden Queen that sail’st above,
Thy dew-tears on the fallen fling,—­
The blighted wreaths of civil strife,
The war that can no triumph bring!

—­O pale with that deep pain of those
Who cannot save, yet must foresee,—­
Surveying all the ills to flow
From that too-victor victory;

When ’gainst the unwisely guided King
The dark self-centred Captain stood,
And law and right and peace went down
In that red sea of brothers’ blood;—­

O long, long, long the years, fair Maid,
Before thy patient eye shall view
The shrine of England’s law restored,
Her homes their native peace renew!

That day; The actual fight lay between 7 and
9 p.m.

Too-victor victory; At Naseby, says Hallam,—­and
the remark, (though Charles was not personally present),
is equally true of Marston Moor—­’Fairfax
and Cromwell triumphed, not only over the king and
the monarchy, but over the parliament and the nation.’

Unwisely guided; ‘Never would it have
been wiser, in Rupert,’ remarks Ranke, ’to
avoid a decisive battle than at that moment.
But he held that the king’s letter not only
empowered, but instructed him to fight.’

THE FUGITIVE KING

August 7: 1645

Cold blue cloud on the hill-tops,
Cold buffets of hill-side rain:—­
As a bird that they hunt on the mountains,
The king, he turns from Rhos lane:
A writing of doom on his forehead,
His eyes wan-wistful and dim;
For his comrades seeking a shelter:
But earth has no shelter for him!

Gray silvery gleam of armour,
White ghost of a wandering king!
No sound but the iron-shod footfall
And the bridle-chains as they ring:
Save where the tears of heaven,
Shed thick o’er the loyal hills,
Rush down in the hoarse-tongued torrent,
A roar of approaching ills.

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But now with a sweeping curtain,
In solid wall comes the rain,
And the troop draw bridle and hide them
In the bush by the stream-side plain.
King Charles smiled sadly and gently;
‘’Tis the Beggar’s Bush,’
said he;
’For I of England am beggar’d,
And her poorest may pity me.’

—­O safe in the fadeless fir-tree
The squirrel may nestle and hide;
And in God’s own dwelling the sparrow
Safe with her nestlings abide:—­
But he goes homeless and friendless,
And manlike abides his doom;
For he knows a king has no refuge
Betwixt the throne and the tomb.

And the purple-robed braes of Alban,
The glory of stream and of plain,
The Holyrood halls of his birthright
Charles ne’er will look on again:—­
And the land he loved well, not wisely,
Will almost grudge him a grave:
Then weep, too late, in her folly,
The dark Dictator’s slave!

This incident occurred during the attempt made by
Charles, in the dark final days of his struggle, to
march from South Wales with the hope of joining Montrose
in Scotland. He appears to have halted for the
night of Aug. 6, 1645, at Old Radnor and ’the
name of Rails Yat, (Royal gate) still points
out the spot where, on the following morning, he left
the Rhos Lane for the road which brought him to shelter
at Beggar’s Bush’: a name which is
reported to be still preserved.

THE CAPTIVE CHILD

September 8: 1650

Child in girlhood’s early grace,
Pale white rose of royal race,
Flower of France, and England’s flower,
What dost here at twilight hour
Captive bird in castle-hold,
Picture-fair and calm and cold,
Cold and still as marble stone
In gray Carisbrook alone?
—­Fold thy limbs and take thy rest,
Nestling of the silent nest!

Ah fair girl! So still and meek,
One wan hand beneath her cheek,
One on the holy texts that tell
Of God’s love ineffable;—­
Last dear gift her father gave
When, before to-morrow’s grave,
By no unmanly grief unmann’d,
To his little orphan band
In that stress of anguish sore
He bade farewell evermore.

Doom’d, unhappy King! Had he
Known the pangs in store for thee,
Known the coarse fanatic rage
That,—­despite her flower-soft age,
Maidenhood’s first blooming fair,—­
Fever-struck in the imprison’d air
As rosebud on the dust-hill thrown
Cast a child to die alone,—­
He had shed, with his last breath,
Bitterer tears than tears of death!

As in her infant hour she took
In her hand the pictured book
Where Christ beneath the scourger bow’d,
Crying ‘O poor man!’ aloud,
And in baby tender pain
Kiss’d the page, and kiss’d again,
While the happy father smiled
On his sweet warm-hearted child;
—­So now to him, in Carisbrook lone,
All her tenderness has flown.

Page 53

Oft with a child’s faithful heart
She has seen him act his part;
Nothing in his life so well
Gracing him as when he fell;
Seen him greet his bitter doom
As the mercy-message Home;
Seen the scaffold and the shame,
The red shower that fell like flame;
Till the whole heart within her died,
Dying in fancy by his side.

—­Statue-still and statue-fair
Now the low wind may lift her hair,
Motionless in lip and limb;
E’en the fearful mouse may skim
O’er the window-sill, nor stir
From the crumb at sight of her;
Through the lattice unheard float
Summer blackbird’s evening note;—­
E’en the sullen foe would bless
That pale utter gentleness.

—­Eyes of heaven, that pass and peep,
Do not question, if she sleep!
She has no abiding here,
She is past the starry sphere;
Kneeling with the children sweet
At the palm-wreathed altar’s feet;
—­Innocents who died like thee,
Heaven-ward through man’s cruelty,
To the love-smiles of their Lord
Borne through pain and fire and sword.

Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles I. and Henrietta
Maria, was born on Innocents’ Day, 1635.
The incident accounted in Stanza iv occurred in 1637.
She had been taken on a visit to Hampton Court to
her mother, who wished her to be present at her own
vesper-service, when Elizabeth, not yet two years
old, became very restless. To quiet her a book
of devotion was shown to her.’ The King,
when the Queen drew his attention, said, ‘She
begins young!’

This tale is told by Mrs. Green, in her excellent
Princesses of England, (London, 1853),—­a
book deserving to be better known,—­on the
authority of the Envoy Con.

The first grief of a very happy and promising childhood
may have been the loss of her sister Anne in 1640.
But by 1642, the evils of the time began to press
upon Princess Elizabeth; her mother’s departure
from England, followed by her own capture by order
of the Parliament; her confinement under conditions
of varying severity; and the final farewell to her
father, Jan. 29, 1649.

From that time her life was overshadowed by the sadness
of her father’s death, her own isolation, and
her increasing feebleness of health. She seems
to have been a singularly winning and intelligent girl,
and she hence found or inspired affection in several
of the guardians successively appointed to take charge
of her. But if she had not been thus marked
by beauty of nature, our indignant disgust would hardly
be less at the brutal treatment inflicted by the Puritan-Independent
authorities upon this child:—­at the refusal
of her prayer to be sent to her elder sister Mary,
in Holland; at the captivity in Carisbrook; at the
isolation in which she was left to die.—­Yet
it is not she who most merits pity!

In this poem, written before the plan of the book
had been formed, I find that some slight deviation
from the best authorities has been made. Elizabeth’s
young brother Henry, Duke of Gloster, shared her prison:
and although her own physician, Mayerne, had been
dismissed, yet some medical attendance was supplied.—­Henry
Vaughan has described the patience of the young sufferer
in two lovely lines:

Page 54

Thou didst not murmur, nor revile,
And drank’st thy wormwood
with a smile.

—­Olor Iscanus;
1651.

THE WRECK OF THE ADMIRAL

A TALE OF PRINCE RUPERT

September 30: 1651

Seventy league from Terceira they lay
In the mid Atlantic straining;
And inch upon inch as she settles they know
The leak on the Admiral gaining.

Below them ’tis death rushes greedily in;
But their signal unheeded is waving,
For the shouts by their billow-toss’d consort
unheard
Are lost in the tempest’s
wild raving.

For Maurice in vain o’er the bulwark leant forth,
While Rupert to rescue was crying;
And the voice of farewell on his face is flung back
With the scud on the billow-top
flying!

But no time was for tears, save for duty no thought,
When brother is parting from brother;
For Rupert the brave and his high-hearted crew,
They must die, as they lived, by
each other.

Unregarded the boat, for none care from their post
To steal off while the Prince is
beside them,
All, all, side by side with his comrades to share
Till the death-plunge at last shall
divide them.

Ah, sharp in his bosom meanwhile is the smart,
He alone for his king is contending!
And the brightness and blaze of his youth in its prime
Must here in mid-waves have their
ending!

—­The seas they break over, the seas they
press in
From fo’csle to binnacle streaming;
And a ripple runs over the Admiral’s deck,
With blue cold witch-fire gleaming.

O then in a noble rebellion they rise;
They may die, but the Prince shall
o’erlive them!
With a loving rough force to the boat he is thrust,
And he must be saved and forgive
them!

Now their flame-pikes they lift, the last signal for
life,
Flaring wild in the wild rack above
them:—­
And each breast has one prayer for the Mercy on high,
And one for the far-off who love
them.

O high-beating hearts that are still’d in the
deep
Unknown treasure-caverns of Ocean!
There, where storms cannot vex, the three hundred
are laid
In their silent heroic devotion.

Rupert, nephew to Charles through his sister Elizabeth,
wife to the Elector Palatine, after the ruin of his
uncle’s cause, carried on the struggle at sea.
The incident here treated occurred on one of his last
voyages, when cruising in the Atlantic near the Canaries:
it is told at full length in E. Warburton’s
narrative of Rupert’s life.

Brother is parting from brother; Maurice, a
year younger than himself,—­then in the
companion ship Swallow, in which Rupert, by
the devoted determination of his comrades, was ultimately
saved. Maurice was not long after drowned in
the West Indies.

Page 55

Flame-pikes; Two ‘fire-pikes,’
it is stated, were burned as a signal just before
the flag-ship sank. Three hundred and thirty-three
was the estimate of the number drowned.

THE RETURN OF LAW

1660

At last the long darkness of anarchy lifts, and the
dawn o’er the gray In rosy pulsation floods;
the tremulous amber of day: In the golden umbrage
of spring-tide, the dewy delight of the sward, The
liquid voices awake, the new morn with music reward.
Peace in her car goes up; a rainbow curves for her
road; Law and fair Order before her, the reinless
coursers of God;—­ Round her the gracious
maids in circling majesty shine; They are rich in
blossoms and blessings, the Hours, the white, the
divine!

Hands in sisterly hands they unite, eye calling on
eye;
Smiles more speaking than words, as the pageant sweeps
o’er the sky.
Plenty is with them, and Commerce; all gifts of all
lands from her horn
Raining on England profuse; and, clad in the beams
of the morn,
Her warrior-guardian of old the red standard rears
in its might;
And the Love-star trembles above, and passes, light
into light.

Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders
on high,
Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses
of sky;
But thou art the wonder of wonders, O Man! Thy
impalpable soul,
Atom of consciousness, measuring the Infinite, grasping
the whole:
Then, on the trivialest transiencies fix’d,
or plucking for fruit
Dead-sea apples and ashes of sin, more brute than
the brute.
Yet in thy deepest depths, filth-wallowing orgies
of night,
Lust remorseless of blood, yet, allow’d an inlet
for light:
As where, a thousand fathom beneath us, midnight afar
Glooms in some gulph, and we gaze, and, behold! one
flash of one star!
For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit
is free
For the human to mix with divine; from himself to
the Highest to flee.
Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—­and
the song that we hear
Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp’d
music is clear:—­
For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still
breathes the light
air
Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied
repair,
Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know
not the doom
In the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of
the womb.
—­I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls
blind and begrimed from the
birth,
But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the
children of earth:—­
For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot
do what they would;
In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing
good.
Faith’s first felicities fade; the world-mists
thicken and roll,
’Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o’er-hazing
the eye of the soul.
Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above
us arise
The phantasmal figures of passion; earth’s mirage

Page 56

exhaled to the skies.
And they go as the castled clouds o’er the verge
when the tempest is
laid,
Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array’d:—­
Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of
yore
With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood,
was fain to adore!
So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch
sacrifice cry,
The conscience of candid childhood, the pure directness
of eye:—­
Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting
his will as his fate,
And the light from above within him is darkness; the
darkness how great!

O Land whom the Gods,—­loving most,—­most
sorely in wisdom have tried, England! since Time was
Time, thrice swept by the conqueror tide, Why on thyself
thrice turn, thrice crimson thy greenness in gore,
With the slain of thy children, as sheep, thy meadows
whitening-o’er? Race impatiently patient;
tenacious of foe as of friend; Slow to take flame;
but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end:
Slow to return to the balance, once moved; not easily
sway’d From the centre, and, star-like, retracing
thy orbit through sunlight and shade! —­Without
hate, without party affection, we now look back on
the fray, Through the mellowing magic of time the
phantoms emerging to day! Grasping too much for
self, unjust to his rival in strife, Each foe with
good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife!
Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to
guide The disdainful coursers of Henry, the Tudor
car in its pride! For he saw not the past was
past; nor the swirl and inrush of the tide, A nation
arising in manhood; its will would no more be denied.
They would share in the labour and peril of State;
they must perish or win; ’Tis the instinct
of Freedom that cries; a voice of Nature within!
Narrow the cry and sectarian oft: true sons of
their age; Justice avenged unjustly; yet more in sorrow
than rage; Till they drank the poison of power, the
Circe-cup of command, And the face of Liberty fail’d,
and the sword was snatch’d from her hand.
Now Law ’neath the scaffold cowers, and,—­shame
engendering shame,—­ The hell-pack of war
is laid close on the land for ruin and flame.
For as things most holy are worst, from holiness when
they decline, So Law, in the name of law once outraged,
demon-divine, Swoops back as Anarchy arm’d,
and maddens her lovers of yore,
Changed from their former selves, and clothed in the
chrisom of gore. Then Falkland and Hampden are
gone; and darker counsels arise; Vane with his tortuous
soul, through over-wisdom unwise; Pym, deep stately
designer, the subtle in simple disguised, Artist in
plots, projector of panics he used, and despised!
—­But as, in the mountain world, where the
giants each lift up their horn To the skies defiant
and pale, and our littleness measure and scorn, Frowning-out
from their far-off summits: and eye and mind may
not know Which is hugest, where all are huge:
But, as from the region we go Receding, the Titan

Page 57

of Titans comes forth, and above him the sky Is deepest:
and lo!—­’tis the White One, the Monarch!—­He
mounts, as we fly! Or as over the sea the gay
ships and the dolphins glisten and flit, And then
that Leviathan comes, and takes his pastime in it;
And wherever he ploughs his dark road, they must sink
or follow him still, For his is the bulkiest strength,
the proud and paramount will! —­Thou
wast great, O King! (for we grudge not the style thou
didst yearn-for in vain, But a river of blood was
between and an ineffaceable stain), Great with an
earth-born greatness; a Titan of awe, not of love;
’Twas strength and subtlety balanced; the wisdom
not from above. For he leant o’er his own
deep soul, oracular; over the pit As the Pythia throned
her of old, where the rock in Delphi was split; And
the vapour and echo within he mis-held for divine;
and the land Heard and obey’d, unwillingly willing,
the voice of command. —­Soaring enormous
soul, that to height o’er the highest aspires;
All that the man can seize being nought to what he
desires! And as, in a palace nurtured, the child
to courtesy grows, Becoming at last what it acts;
so man on himself can impose, Drill and accustom himself
to humility, till, like an art, The lesson the fingers
have learn’d appears the command of the heart;
Whilst pride, as the snake at the charmer’s command,
coils low in its place, And he wears to himself and
his fellows the mask that is almost a face. Truest
of hypocrites, he!—­in himself entangled,
he thinks Earth uprising to Heaven, while earth-ward
the heavenly sinks: Conscience, we grant it,
his guide; but conscience drugg’d and deceived;
Conscience which all that his self-belief whisper’d
as duty believed. And though he sought earnest
for God, in life-long wrestle and prayer, Yet the
sky by a veil was darken’d, a phantom flitting
in air; For a cloud from that seething cavernous heart
fumed out in his youth, And whatever he will’d
in the strength of the soul was imaged as truth:—­
Grew with his growth: And now ’tis Ambition,
disguised in success; And he walks with the step assured,
that cares not its issue to guess, Clear in immediate
purpose: and moulding his party at will, He thrones
it o’er obstinate sects, his ideal constrain’d
to fulfil. Cool in his very heat, self-master,
he masters the realm: God and His glory the flag;
but King Oliver lord of the helm! As he needs,
steers crooked or straight: with his eye controlling
the proud, While blandness runs from his tongue,
as the candidate fawns on the crowd; Sagest of Titans,
he stands; dark, ponderous, muddy-profound, Greatness
untemper’d, untuned; no song, but a chaos of
sound:—­ Yet the key-note is ever beneath:
’Mere humble instruments! See! Poor
weak saints, at the best: but who has triumph’d
as we?’ Thanks the Lord for each massacre-mercy,
His glory, for His is the Cause: Catlike he bridles,
and purrs about God: but within are the claws,
The lion-strength is within!—­Vane, Ludlow,
Hutchinson, knew, When the bauble of Law disappear’d,

Page 58

and the sulky senate withdrew: When the tyrannous
Ten sword-silenced the land, and the necks of the
strong By the heel of their great Dictator were bruised,
wrong trampling on wrong. Least willing of despots!
and fain the fair temple of Law to restore, Sheathing
the sword in the sceptre: But lo! as in legends
of yore, Once drawn, once redden’d, it may not
return to the scabbard!—­and straight On
that iron-track’d path he had framed to the end
he is goaded by Fate. And yet, as a temperate
man, to flavour some exquisite dish, Without stint
pours forth the red wine, thus only can compass his
wish; Upon Erin the death-mark he brands, the Party
and Cause to secure; Not bloodthirsty by birth; just,
liquor ’twas needful to pour; Only the wine
of man’s blood! . . . But the horrible sacrament
thrill’d Right through the heart of a nation;
nor yet is the memory still’d; E’en yet
the dim spectre returns, the ghost of the murderous
years, Blood flushing out in hatred; or blood transmuted
to tears! —­Ah strange drama of Fate!
what motley pageantries rise On the stage of this
make-shift world! what irony silenced in sighs!
For as when the Switzer looks down on the dell, from
the pass and the snow, Sees the peace of the fields,
the white farms, the clear equable streamlet below,
And before him the world unknown, the blaze of the
shadowless Line, Riches ill-purchased in exile, the
toiling plantation and mine; And the horn floats up
the faint music of youth from his forefathers’
fold, And he sighs for the patient life, the peace
more golden than gold:—­ So He now looks
back on the years, and groans ’neath the load
he must bear, Loving this England that loathed him,
and none the burden to share! Gagging not gaining
souls: to the close he wonders in vain Why he
cannot win hearts: why ’tis only the will
that resigns to his reign. As that great image
in Dura, the land perforce must obey, Unloved, unlovely,—­and
not the feet only of iron and clay,—­ Atlas
of this wide realm! in himself he summ’d up the
whole; Its children the Cause had devour’d:
the sword was childless and sole.

—­Ah strange drama of Fate! what motley
pageantries rise
On the stage of this make-shift world! what irony
silenced in sighs!
In the strait beneath Etna for as the waves ebb, and
Scylla betrays
The monster below, foul scales of the serpent and
slime,—­could we gaze
On Tyranny stript of her tinsel, what vision of dool
and dismay!
Terror in confidence clothed, and anarchy biding her
day:
Selfishness hero-mask’d; stage-tricks of the
shabby-sublime;
Impotent gaspings at good; and the deluge after her
time!

—­Is it war that thunders o’er
England, and bursts the millennial oak
From his base like a castle uprooted, and shears with
impalpable stroke
The sails from the ocean, the houses of men, while
the Conqueror lay
On the morn of his crowning mercy, and life flicker’d
down with the day?
Is it war on the earth, or war in the skies, or Nature

Page 59

who tolls
Her passing-bell as from earth they go up, her imperial
souls?
—­He rests:—­’Tis a lion-sleep:
and the sternness of Truth is reproved:
The sleep of a leader of men; unhuman, to watch him
unmoved!
In the stillness of pity and awe we remember his troublesome
years,
For man is the magnet to man, and mortal failure has
tears.
—­He rests:—­On the massive brows,
as a rock by the sunrise is crown’d,
His passionate love for the land, in a glory-coronal
bound!
And Mercy dawns fast o’er the dead, from the
bier as we turn and depart,
England for England’s sake clasp’d firm
as a child to his heart.
—­He rests:—­And the storm-clouds
have fled, and the sunshine of Nature
repress’d
Breaks o’er the realm in smiles, and the land
again has her rest.
He rests: the great spirit is hid where from
heaven the veil is unroll’d,
And justice merges in love, and the dross is purged
from the gold.

The general point of view from which this subject
is here approached is given in the following passages:—­’The
whole nation,’ says Macaulay (1659), ’was
sick of government by the sword, and pined for government
by the law.’ Hence, when Charles landed,
’the cliffs of Dover were covered by thousands
of gazers, among whom scarcely one could be found who
was not weeping with delight . . . Every where
flags were flying, bells and music sounding, wine
and ale flowing in rivers to the health of him whose
return was the return of peace, of law, and of freedom.’
Nor was this astonishing: the name of the Commonwealth,
a greater than Macaulay remarks, ’was grown
infinitely odious: it was associated with the
tyranny of ten years, the selfish rapacity of the
Rump, the hypocritical despotism of Cromwell, the
arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous
decimations of military prefects, the sale of British
citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood
of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial,
. . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the
bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness
of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged
that no measure was ever more national, or has ever
produced more testimonies of public approbation, than
the restoration of Charles II. . . . For the
late government, whether under the parliament or the
protector, had never obtained the sanction of popular
consent, nor could have subsisted for a day without
the support of the army. The King’s return
seemed to the people the harbinger of a real liberty,
instead of that bastard Commonwealth which had insulted
them with its name’ (Hallam: Const.
Hist. ch. x and xi).

Peace in her car; It will be seen that the
Rospigliosi Aurora, Guido’s one inspired
work, has been here before the writer’s memory.

On thyself thrice turn; The civil wars of the
Barons, the Roses, and the Commonwealth.

Page 60

He saw not; Ranke’s dispassionate summary
of the attempted ’arrest of five members,’
which has been always held one of the King’s
most arbitrary steps, as it was, perhaps, the most
fatal, illustrates the view here taken: ’The
prerogative of the Crown, in the sense of the early
kings’ (unconditional right of arrest, in
cases of treason), ’and the privilege of Parliament,
in the sense of coming times, were directly
contradictory to each other’: (viii:
10).

Till they drank the poison; A sentence weighty
with his judicial force may be here quoted from Hallam:—­’The
desire of obtaining or retaining power, if it be ever
sought as a means, is soon converted into an end.’
The career of the Long Parliament supports this judgment:
of it ’it may be said, I think, with not greater
severity than truth, that scarce two or three public
acts of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very
few of political wisdom and courage, are recorded
of them from their quarrel with the King to their
expulsion by Cromwell’: (Const.
Hist. ch. x: Part i).

The chrisom; Name for the white cloth in which
babes were veiled immediately after Baptism.

Artist in plots; See Ranke (viii: 5) for
Pym’s skilful use of a supposed plot, (the main
element in which was known by himself to be untrue),
in older to terrify the House and ensure the destruction
of Stafford; and Hallam (ch. ix).—­Admiration
of Pym may be taken as a proof that a historian is
ignorant of, or faithless to, the fundamental principles
of the Constitution:—­as the worship of Cromwell
is decisive against any man’s love of liberty,
whatever his professions.

O King; ’Cromwell, like so many other
usurpers, felt his position too precarious, or his
vanity ungratified, without the name which mankind
have agreed to worship.’ The conversations
recorded by Whitelock are conclusive on this point:
’and, though compelled to decline the crown,
he undoubtedly did not lose sight of the object for
the short remainder of his life’ (Hallam).

The sky by a veil; See Appendix D.

And he walks; ’He said on one occasion,
He goes furthest who knows not whither he is going’:
(Ranke: xii: 1).

Purrs about God; Examples, (the tone of which
justifies this phrase, and might deserve a severer),
may be found by the curious in the frailties of poor
human nature, passim, in Cromwell’s ’Letters
and Speeches,’ for which, (although not always
edited with precise accuracy), we are indebted to
Mr. T. Carlyle. But the view which he takes of
his ‘hero,’ whether in regard of many
particular facts alleged or neglected, or of the general
estimate of Cromwell as a man,—­as it appears
to the author plainly untenable in face of proved
historical facts, is here rejected.

Page 61

The familiar figure of the Tyrant, too long known
to the world,—­with the iron, the clay,
and the little gold often interfused also in the statue,—­has
been always easily recognisable by unbiassed eyes in
Oliver Cromwell. His tyranny was substantially
that of his kind, before his time and since, in its
actions, its spirit, its result. Fanaticism and
Paradox may come with their apparatus of rhetoric to
blur, as they whitewash, the lineaments of their idol.
Such eulogists may ’paint an inch thick’:
yet despots,—­political, military, ecclesiastical,—­will
never be permanently acknowledged by the common sense
of mankind as worthy the great name of Hero.

The tyrannous Ten; The Major-Generals, originally
ten, (but the number varied), amongst whom, in 1655,
the Commonwealth was divided. They displayed
‘a rapacity and oppression beyond their master’s’
(Hallam): a phrase amply supported by the hardly-impeachable
evidence of Ludlow.

The horrible sacrament; See Appendix
D.

Why he cannot win hearts; ’In the ascent
of this bold usurper to greatness . . . he had encouraged
the levellers and persecuted them; he had flattered
the Long Parliament and betrayed it; he had made use
of the sectaries to crush the Commonwealth; he had
spurned the sectaries in his last advance to power.
These, with the Royalists and Presbyterians, forming
in effect the whole people . . . were the perpetual,
irreconcilable enemies of his administration’
(Hallam ch. x).

Stage-tricks; See the curious regal imitations
and adaptations of the Protector during his later
years, in matters regarding his own and his family’s
titles and state, or the marriage of his daughters.

Mortal failure; See Appendix D.

THE POET’S EUTHANASIA

November: 1674

Cloked in gray threadbare poverty, and blind,
Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God;
High-heartedness to long repulse resign’d,
Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod
The sunless skyless streets he could not see;
By those faint feet made sacrosanct to me.

Yet on that laureate brow the sign he wore
Of Phoebus’ wrath; who,—­for his favourite
child,
When war and faction raised their rancorous roar,
Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,
To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,—­
Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.

—­He goes:—­But with him glides
the Pleiad throng
Of that imperial line, whom Phoebus owns
His ownest: for, since his, no later song
Has soar’d, as wide-wing’d, to the diadem’d
thrones
That, in their inmost heaven, the Muses high
Set for the sons of immortality.

Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,
Vergil: and He, supremest for all time,
In hoary blindness:—­But the sweet lament
Of Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,
Follow’d:—­and that stern Florentine
apart
Cowl’d himself dark in thought, within his heart

Page 62

Nursing the dream of Church and Caesar’s State,
Empire and Faith:—­while Fancy’s favourite
child,
The myriad-minded, moving up sedate
Beckon’d his countryman, and inly smiled:—­
Then that august Theophany paled from view,
To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.

The last ten years of Milton’s life were passed
at his house situate in the (then) ‘Artillery
Walk,’ Bunhill, near Aldersgate. He is
described as a spare figure, of middle stature or
a little less, who walked, generally clothed in a
gray camblet overcoat, in the streets between Bunhill
and Little Britain.

Vergil; placed first as most like Milton in
consummate art and permanent exquisiteness of phrase.
It is to him, also, (if to any one), that Milton
is metrically indebted.—­The other poets
classed as ‘Imperial’ are Homer, Sappho,
Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The supremacy
in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit
to these seven poets, (though with a strong feeling
of diffidence in view of certain other Hellenic and
Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and Archilochus,
less on account of the scanty fragments, though they
be ‘more golden than gold,’ which have
reached us, than in confidence that the place collateral
with Homer, given them by their countrymen (who criticized
as admirably as they created), was, in fact, justified
by their poetry.

The dream; Dante’s political wishes and
speculations, wholly opposed to Milton’s, are,
however, like his in their impracticable originality.

Theophany; Vision of the Gods.

WHITEHALL GALLERY

February 11: 1655

As when the King
of old
’Mid Babylonian
gold,
And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam’d
Unholy radiance,
sate,
And with some
smooth slave-mate
Toy’d, and the wine laugh’d round, and
music stream’d
Voluptuous undulation, o’er the hall,—­
Till on the palace-wall

Forth came a hand
divine
And wrote the
judgment-sign,
And Babylon fell!—­So now, in that his place
Of Tudor-Stuart
pride,
The golden gallery
wide,
’Mid venal beauty’s lavish-arm’d
embrace,
And hills of gambler-gold, a godless King
Moved through
the revelling

With quick brown
falcon-eye
And lips of gay
reply;
Wise in the wisdom not from Heaven!—­as
one
Who from his exile-days
Had learn’d
to scorn the praise
Of truth, the crown by martyr-virtue won:
Below ambition:—­Grant him regal ease!
The rest, as fate
may please!

—­O
royal heir, restored
Not by the bitter
sword,
But when the heart of these great realms in free,
Full, triple,
unison beat
The Martyr’s
son to greet,
Her ancient law and faith and flag with thee
Rethroned,—­not thus!—­in this
inglorious hall
Of harem-festival,

Page 63

Not thus!—­For
even now,
The blaze is on
thy brow
Scored by the shadowy hand of him whose wing
Knows neither
haste nor rest;
Who from the board
each guest
In season calling,—­knight and kerne and
king,—­
Where Arthur lies, and Alfred, signs the way;—­
—­We
know him, and obey.

Lord Macaulay’s lively description of this scene
(Hist. Ch iv) should be referred to.
‘Even then,’ he says, ’the King
had complained that he did not feel well.’

Tudor-Stuart; This famous Gallery was of sixteenth-century
date.

When the heart; The weariness of England under
the triple yoke of Puritanism, the Independents, and
the Protector, has been already noticed: (Note
on p. 125).

‘The Restoration,’ says Professor Seeley,
in an able essay on current perversions of seventeenth-century-history,
’was not a return to servitude, but the precise
contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus
out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the
later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell:
. . . it was their great ambition to appropriate his
methods,’ (and, we may add, to follow his foreign
policy in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit
of the old monarchy. They failed where their
model had succeeded, and the distinction of having
enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.’

THE BALLAD OF KING MONMOUTH

1685

Fear not, my child, though the days be dark,Never fear, he will come
again,With the long brown hair, and the banner
blue,King Monmouth and all his men!

The summer-smiling
bay
Has doff’d
its vernal gray;
A peacock breast of emerald shot
with blue:
Is it peace or
war that lands
On these pale
quiet sands,
As round the pier the boats run-in their silent crew?

Bent knee, and
forehead bare;
That moment was
for prayer!
Then swords flash out, and—­Monmouth!—­is
the cry:
The crumbling
cliff o’erpast,
The hazard-die
is cast,
’Tis James ’gainst James in arms!
Soho! and Liberty!

—­Fear not, my child, though he come
with few;Alone will he come again;God with him, and his right hand more strongThan a thousand thousand men!

They file by Colway
now;
They rise o’er
Uplyme brow;
And faithful Taunton hails her hero-knight:
And girlhood’s
agile hand
Weaves for the
patriot band
The crown-emblazon’d flag, their gathering star
of fight.

—­Ah
flag of shame and woe!
For not by these
who go,
Scythe-men and club-men, foot and
hunger-worn,
These levies raw
and rude,
Can England be
subdued,
Or that ancestral throne from its foundations torn!

Page 64

Yet by the dour
deep trench
Their mettle did
not blench,
When mist and midnight closed o’er
sad Sedgemoor;
Though on those
hearts of oak
The tall cuirassiers
broke,
And Afric’s tiger-bands sprang forth with sullen
roar:

Though the loud
cannon plane
Death’s
lightning-riven lane,
Levelling that unskill’d valour,
rude, unled:
—­Yet
happier in their fate
Than whom the
war-fiends wait
To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering
dead!

—­Yet weep not, my child, though the
dead be dead,And the wounded rise not again!For they are with God who for England fought,And they bore them as Englishmen.

Stout hearts,
and sorely tried!
—­But
he, for whom they died,
Skulk’d like the wolf in Cranborne,
torn and gaunt:—­
Till, dragg’d
and bound, he knelt
To one no prayers
could melt,
Nor bond of blood, nor fear of fate, from vengeance
daunt.

—­O
hill of death and gore,
Fast by the tower’d
shore,
What wealth of precious blood is
thine, what tears!
What calmly fronted
scorn;
What pangs, not
vainly borne!
For heart beats hot with heart, and human grief endears!

—­Then weep not, my child, though the
days be dark;Fear not; He will come again,With Arthur and Harold and good Saint George,King Monmouth and all his men!

Monmouth’s invasion forms one of the most brilliant,—­perhaps
the most brilliant,—­of Lord Macaulay’s
narratives. But many curious details are added
in the History by Mr. G Roberts (1844).

The belief, which this poem represents, that ‘King
Monmouth,’ as he was called in the West, would
return, lasted long. He landed in Lyme Bay,
June 11, 1685, between the Cobb (Harbour-pier) and
the beginning of the Ware cliffs: marching north,
after a few days, by the road which left the ruins
of Colway House on the right and led over Uplyme to
Axminster.

Soho; the watch-word on Monmouth’s side
at Sedgemoor; his London house was in the Fields,
(now Square), bearing that name.

Faithful Taunton; here the Puritan spirit was
strong; and here Monmouth was persuaded to take the
title of king (June 20), symbolized by the flag which
the young girls of Taunton presented to him.
It bore a crown with the cypher J B.—­Monmouth’s
own name being James.

Dour deep trench; Sedgemoor lies in a marshy
district near Bridgewater, much intersected by trenches
or ‘Rhines.’ One, the Busses Rhine,
lay between the two armies as they fought, July 6.
Monmouth was caught hiding in Cranborne Chase, July
8; executed, after a vain attempt to move the heart
of his uncle the king, July 15, on Tower Hill.

Afric’s tiger-bands; Kirke savage troops
from Tangier.

Page 65

WILLELMUS VAN NASSAU

Yes! we confess it! ’mong the sons of Fate,
Earth’s great ones, thou art
great!
As that tall peak which from her silver cone
Of maiden snow unstain’d
All but the bravest scares, and reigns alone

—­O day of triumph, when thy bloodless host
From Devon’s russet coast
Through the fair capital of the garden-West,
And that, whose gracious spire
Like childhood’s prayer springs heaven-ward
unrepress’d,

To Thames march’d legion-like, and at their
tread
The sullen despot fled,
And Law and Freedom fair,—­so late restored,
And to so-perilous life,
While Stuart craft replaced the Usurper’s sword,—­

Broke forth, as sunshine from the breaking sky,
When vernal storm-wings fly!
That day was thine, great Chief, from sea to sea:
The whole land’s welcome seem’d
The welcome of one man! a realm by thee

Deliver’d!—­But the crowning hour
of fame,
The zenith of a name
Is ours once only: and he, too just, too stern,
Too little Englishman,
A nation’s gratitude did not care to earn,

On wider aims, not worthier, set:—­A soul
Immured in self-control;
Saving the thankless in their own despite:—­
Then turning with a gasp
Of joy, to his own land by native right;

Changing the Hall of Rufus and the Keep
Of Windsor’s terraced steep
For Guelderland horizons, silvery-blue;
The green deer-twinkling glades,
And long, long, avenues of the stately Loo.

‘William,’ says his all too zealous panegyrist,
’never became an Englishman. He served
England, it is true; but he never loved her, and he
never obtained her love. To him she was always
a land of exile, visited with reluctance and quitted
with delight. . . . Her welfare was not his chief
object. Whatever patriotic feeling he had was
for Holland. . . . In the gallery of Whitehall
he pined for the familiar House in the Wood at the
Hague, and never was so happy as when he could quit
the magnificence of Windsor for his humbler seat at
Loo:’ (Macaulay: Hist. ch.
vii)

One labouring breath; William throughout life
was tortured by asthma.

Demon’s russet coast; Torbay.—­Capital
of the garden-West; Exeter.—­Gracious
spire; Salisbury.—­Hall of Rufus;
The one originally built by William II at Westminster.

THE CHILDLESS MOTHER

Page 66

Oft I see the brother,
Baby born to woe,
Crouching by the church-wall
From the bloodhound-foe.
Evil crown’d of evil,
Heritage of strife!
Mine, an heirless sceptre:
His, an exile life!

—­O my vanish’d darlings,
From the cradle torn!
Dewdrop lives, that never
Saw their second morn!
Buds that fell untimely,—­
Till one blossom grew;
As I watch’d its beauty,
Fading whilst it blew.

Thou wert more to me, Love,
More than words can tell:
All my remnant sunshine
Died in one farewell.
Midnight-mirk before me
Now my life goes by,
For the baby faces
As in vain I cry.

O the little footsteps
On the nursery floor!
Lispings light and laughter
I shall hear no more!
Eyes that gleam’d at waking
Through their silken bars;
Starlike eyes of children,
Now beyond the stars!

Where the murder’d Mary
Waits the rising sign,
They are laid in darkness,
Little lambs of mine.
Only this can comfort:
Safe from earthly harms
Christ the Saviour holds them
In His loving arms:—­

Spring eternal round Him,
Roses ever fair:—­
Will His mercy set them
All beside me there?
Will their Angels guide me
Through the golden gate?
—­Wait a little, children!
Mother, too, must wait!

I forsook thee; Marlborough, desirous to widen
the breach between Anne and William III, influenced
her to write to her Father, ’supplicating his
forgiveness, and professing repentance for the part
she had taken.’

Now ’tis so; Anne ’was said to
attribute the death of her children to the part she
had taken in dethroning her father:’ (Lecky,
History of the Eighteenth Century).

The brother; The infant son of James, known
afterwards as the ’Old Pretender,’ or
as James III. He was carried as an infant from
the Palace (Dec. 1688) to Lambeth, where he was in
great peril of discovery. The story is picturesquely
told by Macaulay.

One blossom; The Duke of Gloucester, who grew
up to eleven years, dying in July 1700. After
his death Anne signed, in private letters, ’your
unfortunate’ friend.

Anne’s character, says the candid Lecky, ’though
somewhat peevish and very obstinate, was pure, generous,
simple, and affectionate; and she displayed, under
bereavements far more numerous than fall to the share
of most, a touching piety that endeared her to her
people.’

Where the murder’d Mary; ‘Above
and around, in every direction,’ says Dean Stanley,
describing the vault beneath the monument of Mary of
Scotland in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel,—­’crushing
by the accumulated weight of their small coffins the
receptacles of the illustrious dust beneath, lie the
eighteen children of Queen Anne, dying in infancy or
stillborn, ending with William Duke of Gloucester,
the last hope of the race:’ (Historical
Memorials of Westminster Abbey, ch. iii).

Page 67

BLENHEIM

August 13: 1704

Oft hast thou
acted thy part,
My country, worthily
thee!
Lifted up often
thy load
Atlantean, enormous,
with glee:—­
For on thee the burden is laid to
uphold
World-justice; to keep the balance
of states;
On thee the long cry of the tyrant-oppress’d,
The oppress’d in the name
of liberty, waits:—­
Ready, aye ready,
the blade
In its day to
draw forth, unafraid;
Thou dost not
blench from thy fate!
By thy high heart, only, secure; by thy magnanimity,
great.

E’en so
it was on the morn
When France with
Spain, in one realm
Welded, one thunderbolt,
stood,
With one stroke
the world to o’erwhelm.
—­They have pass’d
the great stream, they have stretch’d their white
camp
Above the protecting morass and
the dell,
Blenheim to Lutzingen, where the
long wood
In summer-thick leafage rounds o’er
the fell:
—­England!
in nine-fold advance
Cast thy red flood
upon France;
Over marsh over
beck ye must go,
Wholly together! or, Danube to Rhine, all slides to
the foe!

As the lava thrusts
onward its wall,
One mass down
the valley they tramp;
Fascine-fill the
marsh and the stream;
Like hornets they
swarm up the ramp,
Lancing a breach through the long
palisade,
Where the rival swarms of the stubborn
foe,
While the sun goes high and goes
down o’er the fight,
Sting them back, blow answering
blow:—­
O life-blood lavish
as rain
On war’s
red Aceldama plain!
While the volleying
death-rattle rings,
And the peasant pays for the pride and the fury-ambition
of kings!

And as those of
Achaia and Troia
By the camp on
the sand, so they
In the aether-amber
of evening
Kept even score
in the fray;
Rank against rank, man match’d
with man,
In backward, forward, struggle enlaced,
Grappled and moor’d to the
ground where they stood
As wrestlers wrestling, as lovers
embraced:—­
And the lightnings
insatiable fly,
As the lull of
the tempest is nigh,
And each host
in its agony reels,
And the musket falls hot from the hand, enflamed by
the death that it deals.

But, as when through
the vale the rain-clouds
Darker and heavier
flow,
Above them the
dominant summit
Stands clad in
calmness and snow;
So thou, great Chief, awaiting the
turn
Of the purple tide:—­And
the moment has come!
And the signal-word flies out with
a smile,
And they charge the foe in his fastness,
home:—­
As one long wave
when the wind
Urges an ocean
behind,
One line, they
sweep on the foe,
And France from our battle recoils, and Victory edges
the blow.

Page 68

As a rock by blue
lightning divided
Down the hillside
scatters its course,
So in twain their
army is parted
By the sabres
sabring in force:
They have striven enough for honour!
. . . and now
Crumble and shatter, and sheer o’er
the bank
Where torrent Danube hisses and
swirls
Slant and hurry in rankless rank:—­
There are sixty
thousand the morn
’Gainst
the Lions marching in scorn;
But twenty, when
even is here,
Broken and brave and at bay, the Lilied banner uprear.

—­So
be it!—­All honour to him
Who snatch’d
the world, in his day,
From an overmastering
King,
A colossal imperial
sway!
Calm adamantine endurant chief,
Fit forerunner of him, whose crowning
stroke,
Rousing his Guards on the Flandrian
plain,
Unvassall’d Europe from despot
yoke!
He who from Ganges
to Rhine
Traced o’er
the world his red line
Irresistible;
while in the breast
Reign’d devotedness utter, and self for England
suppress’d!

O names that enhearten
the soul,
Blenheim and Waterloo!
In no vain worship
of glory
The poet turns
him to you!
O sung by worthier song than mine,
If the day of a nation’s weakness
rise,
Of the little counsels that dare
not dare,
Of a land that no more on herself
relies,—­
O breath of our
great ones that were,
Burn out this
taint in the air!
The old heart
of England restore,
Till the blood of the heroes awake, and shout in her
bosom once more!

—­Morning
is fresh on the field
Where the war-sick
champions lie,
By the wreckage
of stiffening dead,
The anguish that
yearns but to die.
Ah note of human agony heard
The paean of victory over and through!
Ah voice of duty and justice stern
That, at e’en this price,
commands them to do!
And a vision of
Glory goes by,
Veil’d head
and remorseful eye,
A triumph of Death!—­And
they cried
’Only less dark than defeat is the morning of
conquest’;—­and sigh’d.

Blenheim is fully described in Lord Stanhope’s
Reign of Queen Anne. Its importance as
a critical battle in European history lies in the fact
that the work of liberating the Great Alliance against
the paramount power of France under Lewis XIV, (which
England had unwisely fostered from Cromwell to James
II), was secured by this victory. ’The
loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses.
A hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world
to regard the armies of Lewis as all but invincible,
when Blenheim and the surrender of the flower of the
French soldiery broke the spell’: (Green:
History of the English People: B. VIII:
ch. iii).

Page 69

’The French and Bavarians, who numbered, like
their opponents, some fifty thousand men, lay behind
a little stream which ran through swampy ground to
the Danube . . . It was not till midday that Eugene,
who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing
the stream. The English foot at once forded
it on the left.’ They were repelled for
the time. But, in the centre, Marlborough, ’by
making an artificial road across the morass which
covered it,’ in two desperate charges turned
the day.

A map of 1705 in the Annals of Queen Anne’s
Reign, shows vast hillsides to the right of the
Allies covered with wood. This map also specifies
the advance of the English in nine columns.

Only less; ‘Marlborough,’ says
Lord Stanhope, ’was a humane and compassionate
man. Even in the eagerness to pursue fresh conquests
he did not ever neglect the care of the wounded.’

AT HURSLEY IN MARDEN

1712

We count him wise,
Timoleon, who in Syracuse laid down
That gleaming bait of all men’s eyes,
And for his cottage changed the invidious crown;
Moving serenely through his grayhair’d day
’Mid vines and olives gray.

He also, whom
The load of double empire, half the world
His own, within a living tomb
Press’d down at Yuste,—­Spain’s
great banner furl’d
His winding-sheet around him,—­while he
strove
The impalpable Above

Though mortal yet,
To breathe, is blazon’d on the sages’
roll:—­
High soaring hearts, who could forget
The sceptre, to the hermitage of the soul
Retired, sweet solitudes of the musing eye,
And let the world go by!

There, if the cup
Of Time, that brims ere we can reach repose,
Fill’d slow, the soul might summon up
The strenuous heat of youth, the silenced foes;
The deeds of fame, star-bright above the throne;
The better deeds unknown.

There, when the cloud
Eased its dark breast in thunder, and the light
Ran forth, their hearts recall the loud
Hoarse onset roar, the flashing of the fight;
Those other clouds piled-up in white array
Whence deadlier lightnings play.

There, when the seas
Murmur at midnight, and the dome is clear,
And from their seats in heaven the breeze
Loosens the stars, to blaze and disappear,And such as Glory! . . . with a sigh suppress’d
They smile, and turn to rest.

—­But he, who here
Unglorious hides, untrain’d, unwilling Lord,
The phantom king of half a year,
From England’s throne push’d by the bloodless
sword,
Unheirlike heir to that colossal fame;—­
How should men name his name,

How rate his worth
With those heroic ones who, life’s labour done,
Mark’d out their six-foot couch of earth,
The laurell’d rest of manhood’s battle
won?
—­Not so with him! . . . Yet, ere we
turn away,
A still small voice will say,

Page 70

By other rule
Than man’s coarse glory-test does God bestow
His crowns: exalting oft the fool,
So deem’d, and the world-hero levelling low.
—­And he, who from the palace pass’d
obscure,
And honourably poor,

Spurning a throne
Held by blood-tenure, ’gainst a nation’s
will;
Lived on his narrow fields alone,
Content life’s common service to fulfil;
Not careful of a carnage-bought renown,
Or that precarious crown:—­

Him count we wise,
Him also! though the chorus of the throng
Be silent: though no pillar rise
In slavish adulation of the strong:—­
But here, from blame of tongues and fame aloof,
’Neath a low chancel roof,

—­The peace of God,—­
He sleeps: unconscious hero! Lowly grave
By village-footsteps daily trod
Unconscious: or while silence holds the nave,
And the bold robin comes, when day is dim,
And pipes his heedless hymn.

Timoleon; was invited from Corinth by the Syracusans
(B.C. 344) to be their leader in throwing off the
tyranny of the second Dionysius. Having effected
this, defeated the Carthaginian invaders, and reduced
all the minor despotisms within Sicily, he voluntarily
resigned his paramount power and died in honoured
retirement.

He also; In 1556 the Emperor Charles V gave
up all his dominions, withdrawing in 1557 to Yuste;—­a
monastery situated in a region of singular natural
beauty, between Xarandilla and Plasencia in Estremadura.
He died there, Sep. 21, 1558.

The phantom king; Richard Cromwell was Protector
from Sep. 3, 1658 to May 25, 1659. After 1660
his life was that of a simple country gentleman, till
his death in 1712, when he was buried at Hursley near
Winchester.

Unheirlike heir; See Appendix E.

CHARLES EDWARD AT ROME

1785

1

O sunset, of the
rise
Unworthy!—­that, so brave,
so clear, so gay;
This, prison’d in low-hanging
earth-mists gray,
And ever-darken’d
skies:—­
Sad sunset of a royal race in gloom,
Accomplishing to the end the dolorous Stuart doom!

2

Ghost of a king,
he sate
In Rome, the city of ghosts and
thrones outworn,
Drowsing his thoughts in wine;—­a
life forlorn;
Pageant of faded
state;
Aged before old age, and all that
Past,
Like a forgotten thing of shame, behind him cast.

3

Yet if by chance
the cry
Of the sharp pibroch through the
palace thrill’d,
He felt the pang of high hope unfulfill’d:—­
And once, when
one came by
With the dear name of Scotland on
his lips,
The heart broke forth behind that forty-years’
eclipse,

Page 71

4

Triumphant in
its pain:—­
Then the old days of Holyrood halls
return’d
The leaden lethargy from his soul
he spurn’d,
And was the Prince
again:—­
All Scotland waking in him; all
her bold
Chieftains and clans:—­and all their tale,
and his, he told:

5

—­Told how, o’er
the boisterous seas
From faithless France he danced his way
Where Alban’s thousand islands lay,
The kelp-strown ridge of the lone Hebrides:—­
How down each strath they stream’d as springtide
rills,
When he to Finnan vale
Came from Glenaladale,
And that snow-handful grew an avalanche of the hills.

6

There Lochiel, Glengarry there,
Macdonald, Cameron: souls untried
In war, but stout in mountain-pride
All odds against all worlds to laugh and dare:
Unpurchaseable faith of chief and clan!
Enough! Their Prince has thrown
Himself upon his own!
By hearts not heads they count, and manhood measures
man!

7

—­Torrent from Lochaber
sprung,
Through Badenoch bare and Athole turn’d,
The fettering Forth o’erpast and spurn’d,
Then on the smiling South in fury flung;
Now gather head with all thine affluent force,
Draw forth the wild mellay!
At Gladsmuir is the fray;
Scotland ’gainst England match’d:
White Rose against White Horse!

8

Cluster’d down the slope
they go,
Red clumps of ragged valour, down,
While morn-mists yet the hill-top crown:—­
Clan Colla! on!—­the Camerons touch the
foe!
One touch!—­the battle breaks, the fight
is fought,
As summit-boulders glide
Riddling the forest-side,
And in one moment’s crash an army melts to nought!

9

—­Ah gay nights
of Holyrood!
Star-eyes of Scotland’s fairest fair,
Sun-glintings of the golden hair,
Life’s tide at full in that brief interlude!
Then as a bark slips from her natural coast
Deep into seas unknown,
Scotland went forth alone,
Unfriended, unallied; a handful ’gainst a host.

10

By the Bolder moorlands bare,
By faithless Solway’s glistening sands,
And where Caer Luel’s dungeon stands,
Huge keep of ancient Urien, huge, foursquare:—­
Preston, and loyal Lancashire; . . . and then
From central Derby down,
To strike the royal town,
And to his German realm the usurper thrust again!

11

—­O the lithesome
mountaineers,
Wild hearts with kingly boyhood high,
And victory in each forward eye,
While stainless honour his white banner rears!
Then all the air with mountain-music thrill’d,
The bonnets o’er the brow,—­
My gallant clans! . . . and now
The voices closed in earth, in death the pibroch still’d!

12

—­As beneath Ben
Aille’s crest
The west wind weaves its roof of gray,
And all the glory of the day
Blooms off from loch and copse and green hill-breast;
So, when that craven council spoke retreat,
The fateful shameful word
They heard,—­and scarcely heard!
At Scotland’s name how should the blood refuse
to beat?

Page 72

13

—­O soul-piercing
stroke of shame!
O last, last, chance,—­and wasted
so!
Work wanting but the final blow,—­
And, then, the hopeless hope, the crownless name,
The heart’s desire defeated!—­What
boots now
That ice-brook-temper’d will,
Indomitable still
As on through snow and storm their path the dalesmen
plough?

14

—­Yet again the
tartans hail
One smile of Scotland’s ancient face;
One favour waits the faithful race,—­
One triumph more at Falkirk crowns the Gael!
And O! what drop of Scottish blood that runs
Could aught, save do or die,
And Bannockburn so nigh?
What cause to higher height could animate her sons?

15

Up the gorse-embattled brae,
With equal eager feet they dash,
And on the moorland summit clash,
Friend mix’d with foe in stormy disarray:
Once more the Northern charge asserts its right,
As with the driving rain
They drive them down the plain:
That star alone before Drummossie gilds the night.

16

—­Ah! No more!—­let
others tell
The agony of the mortal moor;
Death’s silent sheepfold dotted o’er
With Scotland’s best, sleet-shrouded as they
fell!
There on the hearts, once mine, the snow-wreaths
drift;
Night’s winter dews at will
In bitter tears distil,
And o’er the field the stars their squadrons
coldly shift.

17

Faithful in a faithless age!
Yet happier, in that death-dew drench’d,
In each rude hand the claymore clench’d,
Than who, to soothe a nation’s craven rage,
To the red scaffold went with steady eye,
And the red martyr-grave,
For one, who could not save!
Who only lives to weep the weight of life, and die!

18

—­He ended, with such
grief
As fits and honours manhood:—­Then, once
more
Weaving that long romantic lay, told o’er
The names of clan and chief
Who perill’d all for him, and died;—­and
how
In islets, caves, and clefts, and bare high mountain-brow

19

The wanderer hid, and all
His Odyssey of woes!—­Then, agonized
Not by the wrongs he suffer’d and despised,
But for the Cause’s fall,—­
The faces, loved and lost, that for his sake
Were raven-torn and blanch’d, high on the traitor’s
stake,

20

As on Drummossie
drear
They fell,—­as a dead
body falls,—­so he;
Swoon-senseless at that killing
memory
Seen across year
on year:
O human tears! O honourable
pain!
Pity unchill’d by age, and wounds that bleed
again!

21

—­Ah,
much enduring heart!
Ah soul, miscounsell’d oft
and lured astray,
In that long life-despair, from
wisdom’s way
And thy young
hero-part!—­
—­And yet—­DILEXIT
MULTUM!—­In that cry
Love’s gentler judgment pleads; thine epitaph
a sigh!

Page 73

The sad old age of Prince Charles is described by
Lord Mahon [Stanhope] in his able History:
ch. xxx: and some additional details will be found
in Chambers’ narrative of the expedition.
During later life, an almost entire silence seems
to have been maintained by the Prince upon his earlier
days and his royal claims. But the bagpipe was
occasionally heard in the Roman Palace, and a casual
visit, which Lord Mahon fixes in 1785, drew forth
the recital which is the subject of this poem.
The prince fainted as he recalled what his Highland
followers had gone through, and his daughter rushing
in exclaimed to the visitor, ’Sir! what is this!
You must have been speaking to my father about Scotland
and the Highlanders! No one dares to mention
these subjects in his presence:’ (Mahon:
ch. xxvi).

St. 2 Drowsing His thoughts; The habit of intemperance,
common in that century to many who had not Charles
Edward’s excuses, appear to have been learned
during the long privations which accompanied his wanderings,
between Culloden and his escape to France.

St. 5 Hebrides; Charles landed at Erisca, an
islet between Barra and South Uist, in July 1745.

St. 7 Fettering Forth; ‘Forth,’
according to the proverb, ’bridles the wild
Highlandman.’—­Charles passed it at
the Ford of Frew, about eight miles above Stirling.—­At
Gladsmuir; or Preston Pans; Sep. 21, 1745.—­White
Horse; The armorial bearing of Hanover.

St. 8 Clan Colla; general name for the sept
of the Macdonalds.

St. 10 Caer Luel; Urien ap Urbgen is an early
hero of Strathclyde or Alcluith, the British kingdom
lying between Dumbarton and Carlisle, then Caer Luel.

St. 12 Ben Aille; a mountain over Loch Ericht
in the central Highlands.

—­It is also pleasant to record that over
the coffin of Charles in S. Peter’s, Rome, a
monument was placed by George the Fourth, upon which,
by a graceful and gallant ‘act of oblivion,’
are inscribed the names of James the Third, Charles
the Third, and Henry the Ninth, ’Kings of England.’

On the simple monument set up by his brother Henry
in S. Pietro, Frascati, it may be worth notice that
Charles is only described as Paterni iuris et regiae
| dignitatis successor et heres:—­the
title, King, (given to his Father in the inscription),
not being assigned to Charles, or assumed by the Cardinal.

Page 74

TRAFALGAR

October 21: 1805

Heard ye the thunder of battle
Low in the South and afar?
Saw ye the flash of the death-cloud
Crimson o’er Trafalgar?
Such another day never
England will look on again,
When the battle fought was the hottest,
And the hero of heroes was slain!

For the fleet of France and the force of Spain were
gather’d for fight,
A greater than Philip their lord, a new Armada in
might:—­
And the sails were aloft once more in the deep Gaditanian
bay,
Where Redoubtable and Bucentaure and
great Trinidada lay;
Eager-reluctant to close; for across the bloodshed
to be
Two navies beheld one prize in its glory,—­the
throne of the sea!
Which were bravest, who should tell? for both were
gallant and true;
But the greatest seaman was ours, of all that sail’d
o’er the blue.

From Cadiz the enemy sallied: they knew not
Nelson was there; His name a navy to us, but to them
a flag of despair. ’Twixt Algeziras and
Ayamonte he guarded the coast, Till he bore from Tavira
south; and they now must fight, or be lost;—­
Vainly they steer’d for the Rock and the Midland
sheltering sea, For he headed the Admirals round,
constraining them under his lee, Villeneuve of France,
and Gravina of Spain: so they shifted their ground,
They could choose,—­they were more than we;—­and
they faced at Trafalgar round; Rampart-like ranged
in line, a sea-fortress angrily tower’d!
In the midst, four-storied with guns, the dark Trinidada
lower’d.

So with those.—­But meanwhile, as against
some dyke that men massively rear, From on high the
torrent surges, to drive through the dyke as a spear,
Eagled-eyed e’en in his blindness, our chief
sets his double array, Making the fleet two spears,
to thrust at the foe, any way, . . . ’Anyhow!—­without
orders, each captain his Frenchman may grapple perforce:
Collingwood first’ (yet the Victory ne’er
a whit slacken’d her course) ‘Signal for
action! Farewell! we shall win, but we meet not
again!’ —­Then a low thunder of readiness
ran from the decks o’er the main, And on,—­as
the message from masthead to masthead flew out like
a flame, ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY,—­they
came.

—­Silent they come:—­While
the thirty black forts of the foeman’s array
Clothe them in billowy snow, tier speaking o’er
tier as they lay; Flashes that thrust and drew in,
as swords when the battle is rife;—­ But
ours stood frowningly smiling, and ready for death
as for life. —­O in that interval grim,
ere the furies of slaughter embrace, Thrills o’er
each man some far echo of England; some glance of some
face! —­Faces gazing seaward through
tears from the ocean-girt shore; Faces that ne’er
can be gazed on again till the death-pang is o’er.
. . . Lone in his cabin the Admiral kneeling,
and all his great heart As a child’s to the
mother, goes forth to the loved one, who bade him
depart . . . O not for death, but glory! her
smile would welcome him home! —­Louder
and thicker the thunderbolts fall:—­and silent
they come.

Page 75

As when beyond Dongola the lion, whom hunters attack,
Plagued by their darts from afar, leaps in, dividing
them back; So between Spaniard and Frenchman the Victory
wedged with a shout, Gun against gun; a cloud from
her decks and lightning went out; Iron hailing of
pitiless death from the sulphury smoke; Voices hoarse
and parch’d, and blood from invisible stroke.
Each man stood to his work, though his mates fell smitten
around, As an oak of the wood, while his fellow, flame-shatter’d,
besplinters the ground:—­ Gluttons of danger
for England, but sparing the foe as he lay; For the
spirit of Nelson was on them, and each was Nelson that
day.

’She has struck!’—­he shouted—­’She
burns, the Redoubtable! Save whom we
can, Silence our guns’:—­for in him
the woman was great in the man, In that heroic heart
each drop girl-gentle and pure, Dying by those he
spared;—­and now Death’s triumph was
sure! From the deck the smoke-wreath clear’d,
and the foe set his rifle in rest, Dastardly aiming,
where Nelson stood forth, with the stars on his breast,—­
‘In honour I gain’d them, in honour I die
with them’ . . . Then, in his place, Fell
. . . ’Hardy! ‘tis over; but let them
not know’: and he cover’d his face.
Silent, the whole fleet’s darling they bore to
the twilight below: And above the war-thunder
came shouting, as foe struck his flag after foe.

To his heart death rose: and for Hardy, the
faithful, he cried in his pain,—­ ‘How
goes the day with us, Hardy?’ . . . ’’Tis
ours’:—­Then he knew, not in vain
Not in vain for his comrades and England he bled:
how he left her secure, Queen of her own blue seas,
while his name and example endure. O, like a
lover he loved her! for her as water he pours Life-blood
and life and love, lavish’d all for her sake,
and for ours! —­’Kiss me, Hardy!—­Thank
God!—­I have done my duty!’—­And
then Fled that heroic soul, and left not his like
among men.

Hear ye the heart of a nation
Groan, for her saviour is gone;
Gallant and true and tender,
Child and chieftain in one?
Such another day never
England will weep for again,
When the triumph darken’d the triumph,
And the hero of heroes was slain.

TORRES VEDRAS

1810

As who, while erst the Achaians wall’d the shore,
Stood Atlas-like before,
A granite face against the Trojan sea
Of foes who seethed and foam’d,
From that stern rock refused incessantly;

So He, in his colossal lines, astride
From sea to river-side,
Alhandra past Aruda to the Towers,
Our one true man of men
Frown’d back bold France and all the Imperial
powers.

For when that Eagle, towering in his might
Beyond the bounds of Right,
O’ercanopied Europe with his rushing wings,
And all the world was prone
Before him as a God, a King of Kings;

When Freedom to one isle, her ancient shrine,
O’er the free favouring brine
Fled, as a girl by lustful war and shame
Discloister’d from her home,
Barefoot, with glowing eyes, and cheeks on flame,

Page 76

And call’d aloud, and bade the realm awake
To arms for Freedom’s sake:
—­Yet,—­for the land had rusted
long in rest,
The nerves of war unstrung,
Faint thoughts or rash alternate in her breast,

While purblind party-strife with venomous spite
Made plausible wrong seem right,—­
O then for that unselfish hero-chief
Tender and true, and lost
At Trafalgar,—­or him, whose patriot grief

Died with the prayer for England, as he died,
In vain we might have cried!
But this one pillar rose, and bore the war
Upon himself alone;
Supreme o’er Fortune and her idle star.

For not by might but mind, by skill, not chance,
He headed stubborn France
From Tagus back by Douro to Garonne;
And on the last, worst, field,
The crown of all his hundred victories won,

World-calming Waterloo!—­Then, laying by
War’s fearful enginery,
In each state-tempest mann’d the wearying helm;
E’en through life’s
winter-years
Serving with all his strength the ungrateful realm.

O firm and foursquare mind! O solid will
Fix’d, inexpugnable
By crowns or censures! only bent to do
The day’s work in the day;—­
Fame with her idiot yelp might come, or go!

O breast that dared with Nature’s patience wait
Till the slow wheels of Fate
Struck the consummate hour; in leash the while
Reining his eager bands,
The prey in view,—­with that foreseeing
smile!

And when for blood on Salamanca ridge
Morn broke, or Orthez’ bridge,
He read the ground, and his stern squadrons moved
And placed with artist-skill,
Red counters in the perilous game they loved,

Impassive, iron, he and they!—­and then
With eagle-keener ken
Glanced through the field, the crisis-instant knew,
And through the gap of war
His thundering legions on their victory threw.

Not iron, he, but adamant! Diamond-strong,
And diamond-clear of wrong:
For truth he struck right out, whate’er befall!
Above the fear of fear:
Duty for duty’s sake his all-in-all.

Among the many wonders of Wellington’s Peninsular
campaign, from Vimiera (1808) to Toulouse (1814),
the magnificent unity of scheme preserved throughout
is, perhaps, the most wonderful: the dramatic
coherence, development, and final catastrophe of triumph.
For this, however, readers must be referred to Napier’s
History; Enough here to add that one of the
most decisive steps was the formation of the lines
in defence of Lisbon, of which the most northerly
ran from Alhandra on the Tagus by Aruda and Zibreira
to Torres Vedras near the sea-coast at the mouth of
the Zizandre.

When Freedom; the unwise and uncertain management
of the campaign by the English home Government has
been set forth by Napier with so much emphasis as,
in some degree, to impair the reader’s full conviction.
Yet the amazing superiority in energy and wisdom
with which Wellington towered over his contemporaries,
(the field being, however, cleared by the recent deaths
of Nelson and Pitt), is so patent, that this attempt
to do justice to his greatness is offered with hesitation
and apology.

Page 77

Orthez’ Bridge; crosses the river named
Gave de Pau;—­and covered Soult’s
forces then lying north of it.

THE SOLDIERS’ BATTLE

November 5: 1854

In the solid sombre mist
And the drizzling dazzling shower
They may mass them as they list,
The gray-coat Russian power;
They are fifties ’gainst our tens, they, and
more!
And from the fortress-town
In silent squadrons down
O’er the craggy mountain-crown
Unseen, they pour.

On the meagre British line
That northern ocean press’d;
But we never knew how few
Were we who held the crest!
While within the curtain-mist dark shadows loom
Making the gray more gray,
Till the volley-flames betray
With one flash the long array:
And then, the
gloom.

For our narrow line too wide
On the narrow crest we stood,
And in pride we named it Home,
As we sign’d it with our blood.
And we held-on all the morning, and the tide
Of foes on that low dyke
Surged up, and fear’d to strike,
Or on the bayonet-spike
Flung them, and
died.

It was no covert, that,
’Gainst the shrieking cannon-ball!
But the stout hearts of our men
Were the bastion and the wall:—­
And their chiefs hardly needed give command;
For they tore through copse and
gray
Mist that before them lay,
And each man fought, that day,
For his own hand!

Yet should we not forget
’Gainst that dun sea of foes
How Egerton bank’d his line,
Till in front a cloud uprose
From the level rifle-mouths; and they dived
With bayonet-thrust beneath;
Clench’d teeth and sharp-drawn
breath,
Plunging to certain death,—­
And yet survived!

Nor the gallant chief who led
Those others, how he fell;
When our men the captive guns
Set free they loved so well,
And embraced them as live things, by loss endear’d:—­
Nor, when the crucial stroke
On their last asylum broke,
And e’en those hearts of oak
Might well have
fear’d,—­

How Stanley to the fore
The citadel rush’d to guard,
With that old Albuera cryFifty-seventh! Die hard!
Yet saw not how his lads clear the crest,
And, each one confronting five,
The stubborn squadrons rive,
And backward, downward, drive,—­
—­Death-call’d
to rest!

—­O proud and sad for
thee!
And proud and sad for those
Who on that stern foreign field
Not seeking, found repose,
As for England dear their life they gladly shed!
Yet in death bethought them where,
Not on these hillsides bare,
But within sweet English air
Their own home-dead

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In a green and sure repose
Beside God’s house are laid:—­
Then faced the charging foes
Unmoved, unhelp’d, unafraid:—­
For they knew that God would rate each shatter’d
limb
Death-torn for England’s sake,
And in Christ’s own mercy
take
On the day when souls shall wake,
Their souls to
Him!

The battle of Inkermann was mainly fought on a ridge
of rock which projects from the south-eastern angle
of Sebastapol: the English centre of operations
being the ill-fortified line named the ‘Home
Ridge.’ The numbers engaged in field-operations,
roughly speaking, were 4,000 English against 40,000
Russians.

The curtain-mist; The battle began about 6
A.M. under heavy mist and drizzling rain, which lasted
for several hours. Through this curtain the
Russian forces coming down from the hill were seen
only when near enough to darken the mist by their
masses.

Egerton; He commanded four companies of the
77th, and charged early in the battle with brilliant
success;—­his men, about 250, scattering
1500 Russians.

The gallant chief; General Soimonoff, killed
just after Egerton’s charge.

With that old Albuera cry; Prominent in the
defence of the English main base of operations, the
Home Ridge, against a weighty Russian advance, was
Captain Stanley, commanding the 57th. This regiment,
it was said, at the battle of Albuera had been encouraged
by its colonel with the words, ’Fifty-seventh,
die hard’:—­and Stanley, having less
than 400 against 2000, thought the time had come to
remind his ‘Die-hards’ of their traditional
gallantry;—­after which he himself at once
fell mortally wounded.

AFTER CAWNPORE

June: 1857

Fourteen, all told, no more,
Pack’d close within the door
Of that old idol-shrine:
And at them, as they stand,
And from that English band,
The leaden shower went out, and Death proclaim’d
themMine!
Fourteen against an army; they, no more,
Had ’scaped Cawnpore.

With each quick volley-flash
The bullets ping and plash:
Yet, though the tropic noon
With furnace-fury broke
The sulphur-curling smoke,
Scarr’d, sear’d, thirst-silenced, hunger-faint,
they stood:
And soon
A dusky wall,—­death sheltering life,—­uprose
Against their foes.

Behind them now is cast
The horror of the past;
The fort that was no fort,
The deep dark-heaving flood
Of foes that broke in blood
On our devoted camp, victims of fiendish sport;
From that last huddling refuge lured to fly,
—­And help so nigh!

Down toward the reedy shore
That fated remnant pour,
Had Fear and Death beside;
And other spectres yet
Of darker vision flit,—­
Old unforgotten wrongs, the harshness and the pride
Of that imperial race which sway’d the land
By sheer command!

Page 79

O little hands that strain
A mother’s hand in vain
With terror vague and vast:—­
Parch’d eyes that cannot shed
One tear upon the head,
A young child’s head, too bright for such fell
death to blast!
Ah! sadder captive train ne’er filed to doom
Through vengeful Rome!

From Ganges’ reedy shore
The death-boats they unmoor,
Stack’d high with hopeless hearts;
A slowly-drifting freight
Through the red jaws of Fate,
Death-blazing banks between, and flame-wing’d
arrow-darts:—­
Till down the holy stream those cargoes pour
Their flame and gore.

In feral order slow
The slaughter-barges go,
Martyrs of heathen scorn:
While, saved from flood and fire
To glut the tyrant’s ire,
The quick and dead in one, from their red shambles
borne,
Maiden and child, in that dark grave they throw,
Our well of woe!

Ah spot on which we gaze
Through Time’s all-softening haze,
In peace, on them at peace
And taken home to God!
—­O whether ’neath the sod,
Or sea, or desert sand, what care,—­if that
release
From this dim shadow-land, through pathways dim,
Bear us to Him!

But those fourteen, the while,
Wrapt in the present, smile
On their grim baffled foe;
Till o’er the wall he heaps
The fuel-pile, and steeps
With all that burns and blasts;—­and now,
perforce, they go
Hack’d down and thinn’d, beyond that
temple-door
But Seven,—­no more.

O Elements at strife
With this poor human life,
Stern laws of Nature fair!
By flame constrain’d to fly
The treacherous stream they try,—­
And those dark Ganges waves suck down the souls they
bear!—­
Ah, crowning anguish! Dawn of hope in sight;
Then, final night!

And now, Four heads, no more,
Life’s flotsam flung ashore,
They lie:—­But not as they
Who o’er a dreadful past
The heart’s-ease sigh may cast!
Too worn! too tried!—­their lives but given
them as a prey!
Whilst all seems now a dream, a nought of nought,
For which they fought!

—­O stout Fourteen,
who bled
O’erwhelm’d, not vanquished!
In those dark days of blood
How many dared, and died,
And others at their side
Fresh heroes, sprang,—­a race that cannot
be subdued!
—­Like them who pass’d Death’s
vale, and lived;—­the Four
Saved from Cawnpore!

The English garrison at Cawnpore, with a large number
of sick, women, and children, were besieged in their
hastily made and weak earthworks by Nana Sahib from
June 6 to June 25, 1857. Compelled to surrender,
under promise of safe convoy down the Ganges, on the
27th they were massacred by musketry from the banks;
the thatch of the river-boats being also fired.
The survivors were murdered and thrown into the well
upon Havelock’s approach on July 15.

One boat managed to escape unburnt on June 27.
It was chased through the 28th and 29th, by which
time the crowd on board was reduced to fourteen men,
one of whom, Mowbray-Thomson, has left a narrative
equally striking from its vividness and its modesty.
Seven escaped from the small temple in which they
defended themselves; four only finally survived to
tell the story.

Page 80

A dusky wall; ’After a little time they
stood behind a rampart of black and bloody corpses,
and fired, with comparative security, over this bulwark:’
(Kaye: Sepoy War: B. V: ch. ii).

MOUNT VERNON

October 5: 1860

Before the hero’s grave he stood,
—­A simple stone of rest, and bare
To all the blessing of the air,—­
And Peace came down in sunny flood
From the blue haunts of heaven, and smiled
Upon the household reconciled.

—­A hundred years have hardly flown
Since in this hermitage of the West
’Mid happy toil and happy rest,
Loving and loved among his own,
His days fulfill’d their fruitful round,
Seeking no move than what they found.

Sweet byways of the life withdrawn!
Yet here his country’s voice,—­the
cry
Of man for natural liberty,—­
That great Republic in her dawn,
The immeasurable Future,—­broke;
And to his fate the Leader woke.

Not eager, yet, the blade to bare
Before the Father-country’s eyes,—­
—­E’en if a parent’s rights,
unwise,
With that bold Son he grudged to share,
In manhood strong beyond the sea,
And ripe to wed with Liberty!

—­Yet O! when once the die was thrown,
With what unselfish patient skill,
Clear-piercing flame of changeless will,
The one high heart that moved alone
Sedate through the chaotic strife,—­
He taught mankind the hero-life!

As when the God whom Pheidias moulds,
Clothed in marmoreal calm divine,
Veils all that strength ’neath beauty’s
line,
All energy in repose enfolds;—­
So He, in self-effacement great,
Magnanimous to endure and wait.

O Fabius of a wider world!
Master of Fate through self-control
And utter stainlessness of soul!
And when war’s weary sign was furl’d,
Prompt with both hands to welcome in
The white-wing’d Peace he warr’d to win!

Then, to that so long wish’d repose!
The liberal leisure of the farm,
The garden joy, the wild-wood charm;
Life ebbing to its perfect close
Like some white altar-lamp that pales
And self-consumed its light exhales.

No wrathful tempest smote its wing
Against life’s tender flickering flame;
No tropic gloom in terror came;
Slow waning as a summer-spring
The soul breathed out herself, and slept,
And to the end her beauty kept.

Then, as a mother’s love and fears
Throng round the child, unseen but felt,
So by his couch his nation knelt,
Loving and worshipping with her tears:—­
Tears!—­late amends for all that debt
Due to the Liberator yet!

For though the years their golden round
O’er all the lavish region roll,
And realm on realm, from pole to pole,
In one beneath thy stars be bound:
The far-off centuries as they flow,
No whiter name than this shall know!

Page 81

—­O larger England o’er the wave,
Larger, not greater, yet!—­With joy
Of generous hearts ye hail’d the Boy
Who bow’d before the sacred grave,
With Love’s fair freight across the sea
Sped from the Fatherland to thee!

And Freedom on that Empire-throne
Blest in his Mother’s rule revered,
On popular love a kingdom rear’d,
And rooted in the years unknown,—­
Land rich in old Experience’ store
And holy legacies of yore,

And youth eternal, ever-new,—­
From the high heaven look’d out:—­and
saw
This other later realm of Law,
Of that old household first-born true,
And lord of half a world!—­and smiled
Upon the nations reconciled.

The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince
of Wales paid to the tomb of Washington: carrying
home thence, as one of the most distinguished of his
hosts said, ’an unwritten treaty of amity and
alliance.’

Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral,
was the family seat of Augustine, father to George
Washington, and the residence of the latter from 1752.
But all his early years also had been spent in that
neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed
his ideal of life: and thither, on resigning
his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he retired in
1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with
all the strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman
of Vergil’s type. And there (Dec. 1799)
was he buried.

Not eager; When the ill-feeling between England
and America deepened after 1765, Washington ’was
less eager than some others in declaring or declaiming
against the mother country;’ (Mahon: Hist.
ch. lii).

Ripe to wed with Liberty; See Appendix
G.

And to the end; See Petrarch’s beautiful
lines: Trionfo della Morte, cap.
I.

History, it may be said with reasonable confidence,
records no hero more unselfish, no one less stained
with human error and frailty, than George Washington.

The years unknown; It is to Odin, whatever
date be thereby signified, that our royal genealogy
runs back.

SANDRINGHAM

1871

In the drear November gloom
And the long December night,
There were omens of affright,
And prophecies of doom;
And the golden lamp of life burn’d spectre-dim,
Till Love could hardly mark
The little sapphire spark
That only made the dark
More dark and
grim.

There not around alone
Watch’d sister, brother, wife,
And she who gave him life,
White as if wrought in stone
Unheard, invisible, by the bed of death
Stood eager millions by;
And as the hour drew nigh,
Dreading to see him die,
Held their breath.

Page 82

Where’er in world-wide skies
The Lion-Banner burns,
A common impulse turns
All hearts to where he lies:—­
For as a babe the heir of that great throne
Is weak and motionless;
And they feel the deep distress
On wife and mother press,
As ’twere
their own.

O! not the thought of race
From Asian Odin drawn
In History’s mythic dawn,
Nor what we downward trace,
—­Plantagenet, York, Edward, Elizabeth,—­
Heroic names approved,—­
The blood of the people moved;
But that, ’mongst those he
loved,
He fought with
death.

And if the Reason said
’’Gainst Nature’s
law and death
Prayer is but idle breath,’—­
Yet Faith was undismayed,
Arm’d with the deeper insight of the heart:—­
Nor can the wisest say
What other laws may sway
The world’s apparent way,
Known but in part.

Nor knew we on that life
What burdens may be cast;
What issues wide and vast
Dependent on that strife:—­
This only:—­’Twas the son of those
we loved!
That in his Mother’s hand
Peace set her golden wand;
’Mid heaving realms, one land
Law-ruled, unmoved.

—­He fought, and we with
him!
And other Powers were by,
Courage, and Science high,
Grappling the spectre grim
On the battle-field of quiet Sandringham:
And force of perfect Love,
And the will of One above,
Chased Death’s dark squadrons
off,
And overcame.

—­O soul, to life restored
And love, and wider aim
Than private care can claim,
—­And from Death’s
unsheath’d sword!
By suffering and by safety dearer made:—­
O may the life new-found
Through life be wisdom-crown’d,—­
Till in the common ground
Thou too art laid!

A DORSET IDYL

HARCOMBE NEAR LYME

September: 1878

Before me with one happy heave
Of golden green the hillside curves,
Where slowly, smoothly, rounding swerves
The shadow of each perfect tree,
By slanting shafts of eve
Flame-fringed and bathed in pale transparency.

And that long ridge that crowns
the hill
Stands fir-dark ’gainst the falling rays;
Above, a waft of pearly haze
Lies on the sapphire field of air,
So radiant and so still
As though a star-cloud took its station there.

Up wold and wild the valley goes,
’Mid heath and mounded slopes of oak,
And light ash-thicket, where the smoke
Wreathes high in evening’s air serene,
Floating in white repose
O’er the blue reek of cottage-hearths unseen.

Another landscape at my feet
Unfolds its nearer grace the while,
Where gorses gleam with golden smile;
Where Inula lifts a russet head
The shepherd’s spikenard sweet;
And closing Centaury points her rosy red.

—­Grief on a happier future
dwells;
The happy present haunts the past;
And those old minstrels who outlast
Our looser-textured webs of song,
Nursed in Hellenic dells,
Sicilian, or Italian, hither throng.

Why care if Turk and Tartar fume,
Barbarian ’gainst barbarian set,
Or how our politic prophets fret,
When on this tapestry-thyme and heath,
Fresh work of Nature’s loom,
Thus, thus, we can diffuse ourselves, and breathe

Autumnal sparkling freshness?—­while
The page by some bless’d miracle saved
When Goth and Frank ’gainst Hellas raved.
Paints how the wanderer-chief divine,
Snatch’d from Circaean guile,
Led by Nausicaa past Athene’s shrine,

In that delicious garden sate
Where summer link’d to summer glows,
Grapes ever ripe, and rose on rose;
And all the wonders of thy tale
—­O greatest of the great—­
Whose splendour ne’er can fade, nor beauty fail!

Or by the city of God above
In rose-red meadows, where the day
Eternal burns, the bless’d ones stray;
The harp lets loose its silver showers
From the dark incense-grove;
And happiness blooms forth with all her flowers.

Or white Colonos here through green
Green Dorset winds his holy vale,
Where the divine deep nightingale
Heaps note on note and love on love,
In ivy thick unseen,
While goddesses with Dionysos rove.

Another music then we hear,
A cry from the Sicilian dell,
’Here ’mid sweet grapes and laurel
dwell;
Slips by from wood-girt Aetna’s dome
Snow-cold the stream and clear:—­
Hither to me, come, Galataea, come!’

—­Voices and dreams long
fled and gone!
And other echoes make reply,
The low Maenalian melody
’’Twas in our garth, a twelve-year
child,
I saw thee, little one,
Pick the red fruit that to thy fancy smiled,

’Thee and thy mother:
I, your guide:’—­
O sweet magician! Happy heart!
Content with that unrivall’d art,—­
The soul of grace in music shrined,—­
And notes of modest pride,
To sing the life he loved to all mankind!

—­O loftier than the wordy
strife
That floats o’er capitals; the chase
Of florid pleasure; the blind race
Of gold for gold by gamblers run,
This fair Vergilian life,
Where heaven and we and nature are at one!

Page 84

On that deep soil great Rome was
sown;
Our England her foundations laid:—­
Hence, while the nations, change-dismay’d,
To tyrant or to quack repair,
A healthier heart we own,
And the plant Man grows stronger than elsewhere.

Should changeful commerce shun the
shore,
And newer, mightier races meet
To push us from our empire-seat,
England will round her call her own,
And as in days of yore
The sea-girt Isle be Freedom’s central throne.

Freedom, fair daughter-wife of Law;
One bright face on the future cast,
One reverent fix’d upon the past,
And that for Hope, for Wisdom this:—­
While counsels wild and raw
Fly those keen eyes, and leave the land to bliss:—­

Dear land, where new is one with
old:
Land of green hillside and of plain,
Gray tower and grange and tree-fringed lane,
Red crag and silver streamlet sweet,
Wild wood and ruin bold,
And this repose of beauty at my feet:—­

Ranging the brambled hollows free
For purple feast;—­till, light as
Hope,
The little footsteps scale the slope;
And from the highest height we view
Our island-girdling sea
Bar the green valley with a wall of blue.

The poets whose landscape-pictures are here contrasted
with English scenery, are Homer, Pindar, Sophocles,
Theocritus, and Vergil.

A HOME IN THE PALACE

1840-1861

Thrice fortunate he
Who, in the palace born, has early learn’d
The lore of sweet simplicity:
From smiling gold his eyes inviolate turn’d,
Turn’d unreturning:—­Who the people’s
cause,
The sovereign-levelling laws,

Above the throne,
—­He made for them, not they for him,—­has
set;
Life-lavish for his land alone,
Whether she crown with gratitude, or forget:—­
He, who in courts beneath the purple weight
Of precedence moves sedate,

By all that glare
Of needful pageantry less stirr’d than still’d,
Bringing a waft of natural air
Through halls with pomp and flattering incense fill’d;
And in the central heart’s calm secret, waits
The closure of the gates,

The music mute,
The darkling lamps, the festal tables clear:—­
Then,—­glad as one who from pursuit
Breathes safe, and lets himself himself appear,—­
Turns to the fireside jest, the laughing eyes,
The love without disguise,—­

On home alone,
The loyal partnership of man with wife,
Building a throne beyond the throne;
All happiness in that common household life
By peasant shared with prince,—­when toil
and health,
True parents of true wealth,

To its fair close
Round the long day, and all are in the nest,
And care relaxes to repose,
And the blithe restless nursery lulls to rest;
Prayer at the mother’s knee; and on their beds
We kiss the shining heads!

Page 85

—­Thrice fortunate
he
Who o’er himself thus won his masterdom,
Earning that rare felicity
E’en in the palace walls to find the Home!
Who shaped his life in calmness, firm and true,
Each day, and all day through,

To that high goal
Where self, for England’s sake, was self-effaced,
In silence reining-in his soul
On the strait difficult line by wisdom traced,
’Twixt gulf and siren, avalanche and ravine,
Guarding the golden mean.

Hence, as the days
Went by, with insight time-enrich’d and true,
O’er Europe’s policy-tangled maze
He glanced, and touch’d the central shining
clue:
And when the tides of party roar’d and surged,
’Gainst the state-bulwarks urged

By factious aim
Masquing beneath some specious patriot cloke,
Or flaunting a time-honour’d name,—­
Athwart the flood he held an even stroke;
Between extremes on her old compass straight
Aiding to steer the state.

With equal mind,
Hence,—­sure of those he loved on earth,
and then
His loved ones sure again to find,—­
For Christ’s and England’s cause, Goodwill
to men,
To the end he strove, and put the fever by,—­
Ready to live or die.

—­And if in death
We were not so alone, who might not quit,
Smiling, this tediousness of breath,
These bubble joys that flash and burst and flit,—­
This tragicomedy of life, where scarce
We know if it be farce,

A puppet-sight
Of nerve-pull’d dolls that o’er the world
dance by,
Or Good in that unequal fight
With Ill . . . who from such theatre would not fly?
—­But those dear faces round the bed disarm
Death of his natural charm!

—­O Prince, to Her
First placed, first honour’d in our love and
faith,
True stay, true constant counseller,
From that first love of boyhood’s prime,—­to
death!
O if thy soul on earth permitted gaze
In these less-fortunate days

When, hour by hour,
The million armaments of the world are set
Skill-weapon’d with new demon-power,
Mouthing around this little isle, . . . and yet
On dream-security our fate we cast,
Of all that glory-past

With light fool-heart
Oblivious! . . . O in spirit again restored,
Insoul us to the nobler part,
The chivalrous loyalty of thy life and word!
Thou, who in Her to whom first love was due,
Didst love her England too,

If earthly care
In that eternal home, where thou dost wait
Renewal of the days that were,
Move thee at all,—­upon the realm estate
The wisdom of thy virtue, the full store
Thy life’s experience bore!

O known when lost,
Lost, yet not fully known, in all thy grace
Of bloom by cruel early frost,
Best prized and most by Her, to whom thy face
Was love and life and counsel:—­If this
strain
Renew not all in vain

The bitter cry
Of yearning for the loss we yet deplore,—­
Yet for her heart, who stood too nigh
For comfort, till God’s hour thy face restore.
Man has no lenitive! He, who wrought the grief,
. . .
Alone commands relief.

Page 86

—­Thou, as the rose
Lies buried in her fragrance, when on earth
The summer-loosen’d blossom flows,
Art sepulchred and embalm’d in native worth:
While to thy grave, in England’s anxious years,
We bring our useless tears.

Above the throne; ’He knows that if Princes
exist, it is for the good of the people. . . .
Well for him that he does so,’ was the remark
made by an observing foreigner on Prince Albert:
(Martin: Life of H.R.H. the Prince Consort:
ch. xi).

On home alone; ‘She who reigns over us,’
said the then Mr. Disraeli when seconding the Address
on the death of the Duchess of Kent, (March, 1861),
’She who reigns over us has elected, amid all
the splendour of empire, to establish her life on
the principle of domestic love’ (Martin:
ch. cxi).

Firm and true, ‘Treu und Fest’
is the motto of the Saxe-Coburg family.

Goodwill to men; A revision of the despatch
to the Cabinet of the United States, remonstrating
on the ‘Trent affair,’ whilst the fatal
fever was on him, was the last of Prince Albert’s
many services (Nov. 30, 1861) to England. To
the temperate and conciliatory tone which he gave
to this message, its success in the promotion of peace
between the two countries was largely due: (Martin:
ch. cxvi).

ODE

FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE 1887

. . . Sunt hic sua praemia laudi, Sunt
lacrimae rerum . . .

As when the snowdrop from the snowy
ground
Lifting a maiden face, foretells
the flowers
That lurk and listen, till the chaffinch
sound
Spring’s advent with the glistening
willow crown’d,
Sheathed in their silken bowers:—­
E’en so the promise of her
life appears
Through those white childhood-years;
—­Whether in seaside happiness,
and air
Rosing the fair cheek,—­sand,
and spade, and shell,—­
Or race with sister-feet, that flash’d
and fell
Printing the beach, while the gay
comrade-wind
Play’d in the soft light hair:—­
Or if with sunbeam-smile and kind
Small hand at cottage-door
Her simple alms she tender’d
to the poor:
Love’s healthy happy heart in all her steps
was seen,
And God, in life’s fresh springtime,
bless’d our Queen.

Lo! the quick months their order’d
dance pursue,
And Spring’s bright apple-blossoms
flush to fruit;
The bay-tree thrives ’neath
Heaven’s own gracious dew,
And her young shoots the parent-life
renew
Around the fostering root.
—­The Girl from care in
youth’s sweet sleep withdrawn
Wakes to a crown at dawn!
But Love is at her side, strong,
faithful, wise,
To share the world-wide burden of
command,
The sceptre’s weight in the
unlesson’d hand;
To aid each nursery inmate,—­each
in turn
Dear pride of watchful eyes,—­

Page 87

To clasp the innocent hands, and
learn
The words of love and grace,
Lifting their souls to the compassionate
Face:—­
While o’er the fortunate fold the Shepherd watch’d
unseen;
And home, in all its beauty, bless’d
a Queen.

Ah! Happy she, who wedded
finds in one
Wisest and dearest! happy, happy
years!
But summer whirlwinds wait on summer’s
sun;
Where the Five Rivers from Himala
run,
His snow where Everest rears,
Or Alma’s echoing crags with
war-cry wake
The wind-vext Euxine lake.
—­O Death in myriad forms!
O brutal roar
Of battle! throes of race, and crash
of thrones!
Imploring hands, and wreck of whitening
bones
In Khyber pass;—­Or woman’s
stifled cry,
And that dark pit of gore!
—­Yet night had light;
for He was by,
Her heart, her strength, her shield,
Twin-star in the Throne’s
radiance self-conceal’d;
Love’s hand laid light on hers, guiding the
ship unseen—­
For God’s best grace in Albert
bless’d the Queen.

But at man’s side each hour
with ambush’d sword
Death hurries, nor for prayer nor
love delays;
In God’s own time His harvest-sheaves
are stored,
‘For My thoughts are not your
thoughts,’ saith the Lord,
‘Nor are your ways My ways.’
He Who spared not the Son His bitter
cup,
The broken heart binds up
In His fit hour, All-Merciful!—­And
she,
The desolate faithful Mother, in
the nest
By children’s love soft-woven,
has found rest;
Some constant to her side, if some
have flown
The Angels’ road, and see
The Vision of the Eternal Throne:—­
With them, ’tis well!—­But
thou,
Strong through submission, to His
will dost bow,
Till God renew the home in that far realm unseen,
And bless with all her lost ones
England’s Queen.

Yet in great Nature’s changeful
mystic dance
Joy circles grief, gay dawn outsmiles
the night:
’Tis meet our song should
build its radiance
Like some high palace-porch, and
walls that glance
With gold and marble light:
Now fifty suns ’neath one
firm patriot sway
Have whirl’d their shining
way.
—­Lo Commerce with the
golden girdling chain
That links all nations for the good
of each;
While Science boasts her silent
lightning speech
Swifter than thought; and how her
patience rein’d
To post o’er earth and main
The panting white-breath’d
Titan, chain’d
Bondslave to man:—­and
won
The magic spark o’erdazzling
star and sun
From its dark cave: for He, the all-seeing Lord
unseen
Enlightening, bless’d the
years of England’s Queen.

O much enduring, much revered!
To thee
Bring sun-dyed millions love more
sweet than fame,
And happy isles that star the purple
sea
Homage;—­and children
at the mother’s knee
With her’s unite thy name;
And faithful hearts, that throb
’neath palm and pine,
From East to West, are thine.
For as some pillar-star o’er
sea and storm
Whole fleets to haven guides, so
from that height
One great example points the path
of Right,
And purifies the home; with gracious
aid
Lifting the fallen form.
See Death by finer skill delay’d;
Kind hearts to wait on woe,
And feet of Love that in Christ’s
footsteps go;
Wild wastes of life reclaim’d by Woman’s
hand unseen:
All England bless’d with England’s
Empress Queen.

And now, as one who through some
fruitful field
Has urged the fifty furrows of the
grain,—­
Look round with joy, and know thy
care will yield
A thousandfold in its due day reveal’d,
The harvest laugh again:—­
E’en now thy great crown’d
ancestors on high
Watch with exultant eye
Thy hundred Englands o’er
the broad earth sown,
And Arthur lives anew to hail his
heir!
—­O then for her and us
we chant the prayer,—­
Keep Thou this sea-girt citadel
of the free
Safe ’neath her ancient throne,
Love-link’d in loyal unity;
Let eve’s calm after-glow
Arch all the heaven with Hope’s
wide roseate bow:
Till in Time’s fulness Thou, Almighty Lord unseen,
With glory and life immortal crown
the Queen.

Published (June, 1887) under sanction of the Delegates
of the Clarendon Press, Oxford; and intended as an
humble offering of loyalty and hearty good-wishes
on the part of the University.

ENGLAND ONCE MORE

Old if this England be
The Ship at heart is sound,
And the fairest she and gallantest
That ever sail’d earth round!
And children’s children in the years
Far off will live to see
Her silver wings fly round the world,
Free heralds of the free!
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless her as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

Page 89

They are firm and fine, the masts;
And the keel is straight and true;
Her ancient cross of glory
Rides burning through the blue:—­
And that red sign o’er all the seas
The nations fear and know,
And the strong and stubborn hero-souls
That underneath it go:—­
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless her as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

Prophets of dread and shame,
There is no place for you,
Weak-kneed and craven-breasted,
Amongst this English crew!
Bluff hearts that cannot learn to yield,
But as the waves run high,
And they can almost touch the night,
Behind it see the sky.
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless her as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

As Past in Present hid,
As old transfused to new,
Through change she lives unchanging,
To self and glory true;
From Alfred’s and from Edward’s day
Who still has kept the seas,
To him who on his death-morn spoke
Her watchword on the breeze!
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless her as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

What blasts from East and North,
What storms that swept the land
Have borne her from her bearings
Since Caesar seized the strand!
Yet that strong loyal heart through all
Has steer’d her sage and free,
—­Hope’s armour’d Ark in glooming
years,
And whole world’s sanctuary!
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless her as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

Old keel, old heart of oak,
Though round thee roar and chafe
All storms of life, thy helmsman
Shall make the haven safe!
Then with Honour at the head, and Faith,
And Peace along the wake,
Law blazon’d fair on Freedom’s flag,
Thy stately voyage take:—­
While now on Him who long has bless’d
To bless Thee as of yore,
Once more we cry for England,
England once more!

APPENDIX

A: p. 87

Till the terrible Day unreveal’d; Much
of course is and will probably remain unknown among
the details of that fatal and fascinating drama, Mary’s
life. But all hitherto ascertained evidence has
now, mainly by Mr. Hosack, been sifted so closely
and so ably that the main turning points in her career
seem to have reached that twilight certainty beyond
which History can rarely hope to go, and are placed
beyond the reach of reasonable controversy.
Such, (not to enter upon the Queen’s life as
Elizabeth’s captive), is the more than Macchiavellian—­the
almost incredible—­perfidy of the leading
Scottish politicians, united with a hypocrisy more
revolting still, and enabled to do its wicked work,
(with regret we must confess), by the shortsighted

Page 90

bigotry of Knox:—­The gradual forgery of
the letters by which the Queen’s death was finally
obtained from the too-willing hands of Elizabeth’s
Cabinet:—­The all but legally proved innocence
of Mary in regard to Darnley’s death, and the
Bothwell marriage. Taking her life as a whole,
it may be fairly doubted whether any woman has ever
been exposed to trials and temptations more severe,
or has suffered more shamefully from false witness
and fanatical hatred. But the prejudices which
have been hence aroused are so strong, such great
interests, religious and political, are involved in
their maintenance, that they will doubtless prevail
in the popular mind until our literature receives,—­what
an age of research and of the scientific spirit should
at last be prepared to give us,—­a tolerably
truthful history of the Elizabethan period. (1889)

B: p. 102

Heroes both;—­Each his side;—­In
regard to the main issue at stake in the Civil War,
and the view taken of it throughout this book, let
me here once for all remark that no competent and
impartial student of our history can deny a fair cause
to each side, whatever errors may have been committed
by Charles and by the Parliament, or however fatal
for some fifteen years to liberty and national happiness
were the excesses and the tyranny into which the victorious
party gradually, and as it were inevitably, drifted.
‘No one,’ says Ranke (whom I must often
quote, because to this distinguished foreigner we
owe the single, though too brief, narrative of this
period in which history has been hitherto, treated
historically, that is, without judging of the events
by the light either of their remote results, or of
modern political party), ’will make any very
heavy political charge against Strafford on the score
of his government of Ireland, or of the partisan attitude
which he had taken up in the intestine struggle in
England in general; for the ideas for which he contended
were as much to be found in the past history of England
as were those which he attacked:’ —­and
Hampden’s conduct may claim analogous justification.
If the Parliament could appeal to those mediaeval
precedents which admitted the right of the people through
their representatives, to control taxation and (more
or less) direct national policy, Charles, (and Strafford
with him), might as lawfully affirm that they too
were standing ‘on the ancient ways’; on
the royal supremacy undeniably exercised by Henry
II or Edward I. by Henry VIII and by Elizabeth.
Both parties could equally put forward the prosperity
of England under these opposed modes of government:
Patriotism, honour, conscience, were watchwords which
either might use with truth or abuse with profit.
If the great struggle be patiently studied, the moral
praise and censure so freely given, according to a
reader’s personal bias, will be found very rarely
justified. There was far, very far, less of
tyranny or of liberty involved in the contest, up to
1642, than partisans aver. To the actual actors
(nor, as retrospectively criticized by us) it is a
fair battle on both sides, not a contest ’between
light and darkness.’

Page 91

We, looking back after two centuries, are of course
free to recognize, that one effect of the Tudor despotism
had been to train Englishmen towards ruling themselves;—­we
may agree that the time had come for Lords and Commons
to take their part in the Kingdom. But no proof,
I think it may be said, can be shown that this great
idea, in any conscious sense, governed the Parliaments
of James and Charles. It is we who,—­reviewing
our history since the definite establishment of the
constitutional balance after 1688, and the many blessings
the land has enjoyed,—­can perceive what
in the seventeenth century was wholly hidden from
Commonwealth and from King. And even if in accordance
with the common belief, we ascribe English freedom
and prosperity and good government to the final triumph
of the popular side, yet deeper consideration should
suggest that such retrospective judgments are always
inevitably made under our human entire ignorance what
might have been the result had the opposite party
prevailed. Who should say how often, in case
of these long and wide extended struggles,—­political
and dynastic,—­the effects which we confidently
claim as propter hoc, are only post hoc
in the last reality?

Waiving however these somewhat remote and what many
will judge over-sceptical considerations, this is
certain, that unless we can purify our judgment from
reading into the history of the past the long results
of time;—­from ascribing to the men of the
seventeenth century prophetic insight into the nineteenth;—­unless,
in short, we can free ourselves from the chain of
present or personal prepossessions;—­no approach
can be made to a fair or philosophical judgment upon
such periods of strife and crisis as our Civil War
preeminently offers.

C: p. 108

With glory he gilt; Yet to readers, (if such
readers there be) who can look with an undazzled eye
on military success, or hear the still small voice
of truth through the tempest of rhetoric, Cromwell’s
foreign policy, (excepting the isolated case of his
interference with the then comparatively feeble powers
of Savoy and the Papacy on behalf of the persecuted
Waldenses), will be far from supporting the credit
with which politico-theological partisanship has invested
it.

Holland was beyond question the natural ally on political
and religious grounds of puritan England. But
a mischievous war against her in 1652-3 was caused
by the arrogant restrictions of the Navigation Act
of 1651. The successful English demand in 1653
that the Orange family, as connected closely with
that of Stuart, should be excluded from the Stadtholdership,
was in a high degree to the prejudice of the United
Provinces.

In 1654 Cromwell was negotiating with France and Spain.
From the latter he arrogantly asked wholly unreasonable
terms, whilst Mazarin, on the part of France, offered
Dunkirk as a bribe. News opportunely arriving
that certain Spanish possessions in America were feebly
armed, Cromwell at once declared war: and now,
supplementing unscrupulous policy by false theology,
announced ’the Spaniards to be the natural and
ordained enemies of England, whom to fight was a duty
both to country and to religion:’ (Ranke:
xii. 6).

Page 92

The piratical war which followed, in many ways similar
to that which the ‘wise Walpole’ tried
to avert in 1739, was hardly less impolitic than immoral.
It alienated Holland, it sanctioned French aggression
on Flanders (xii. 7), it ended by giving Mazarin and
Lewis XIV that supremacy in Western Europe for which
England had to pay in the wars of William III and
Anne; whilst, as soon as it was over, France naturally
allied herself with Spain, on a basis which might have
caused the union of the two crowns (xii. 8) and which
allowed Spain at once to support Charles II.
As the result of the Protector’s ‘spirited
policy’ England thus figured as the catspaw
of France, and the enemy of European liberty.

It is satisfactory, however, to find that, in Ranke’s
judgment, the common modern opinion that Cromwell’s
despotism was favourably regarded in England because
of his foreign enterprize, is exaggerated. Even
against the conquest of Jamaica,—­his single
signal gain,—­unanswerable arguments were
popularly urged at the time: (xii. 4, 8)—­But
the Protectorate, in the light of modern research,—­like
the reign of Elizabeth,—­still awaits its
historian.

D: p. 127

The sky by a veil; ‘A spiritual world,’
says a critic of deep insight, ’over and above
this invisible one, is a most important addition to
our idea of the universe; but it does not of itself
touch our moral nature. . . . Its moral effect
depends entirely upon what we make that world to be.’—­Cromwell’s
religion, which may be profitably studied in his letters
and speeches, (much better known of, than read) reveals
itself there as the simple reflex of his personal
views: it had great power to animate, little
or none to regulate or control his impulses.
He had, indeed, a most real and pervading ’natural
turn for the invisible; he thought of the invisible
till he died; but the cloudy arch only canopied a field
of human aim and will.’

The horrible sacrament; The summary of Cromwell’s
conduct at Drogheda by a writer of so much research,
impartiality, and philosophic liberality as Mr. Lecky
deserves to be well considered.

’The sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, and the
massacres that accompanied them, deserve to rank in
horror with the most atrocious exploits of Tilly and
Wallenstein, and they made the name of Cromwell eternally
hated in Ireland. It even now acts as a spell
upon the Irish mind, and has a powerful and living
influence in sustaining the hatred both of England
and Protestantism. The massacre of Drogheda acquired
a deeper horror and a special significance from the
saintly professions and the religious phraseology
of its perpetrators, and the town where it took place
is, to the present day, distinguished in Ireland for
the vehemence of its Catholicism:’ (Hist.
of Eighteenth Cent. ch. vi).

Page 93

Mortal failure; The ever-increasing unsuccess
of Cromwell’s career is forcibly set forth by
Ranke (xii. 8). He had ’crushed every enemy,—­the
Scottish and the Presbyterian system, the peers and
the king, the Long Parliament and the Cavalier insurgents,—­but
to create . . . an organization consistent with the
authority which had fallen to his own lot, was beyond
his power. Even among his old’ Anabaptist
and Independent ’friends, his comrades in the
field, his colleagues in the establishment of the
Commonwealth, he encountered the most obstinate resistance.
. . . At no time were the prisons fuller; the
number of political prisoners was estimated at 12,000
. . . The failure of his plans soured and distracted
him.’ It was, in fact, wholly ’beyond
his power to consolidate a tolerably durable political
constitution.’—­To the disquiet caused
by constant attempts against Cromwell’s life,
Ranke adds the death of his favourite daughter, Lady
Claypole, whose last words of agony ’were of
the right of the king, the blood that had been shed,
the revenge to come.’

E: p. 146

Unheirlike heir; Richard Cromwell has received
double measure of that censure which the world’s
judgment too readily gives to unsuccess, finding favour
neither from Royalists nor Cromwellians. Macaulay,
with more justice, remarks, ’That he was a good
man he evinced by proofs more satisfactory than deep
groans or long sermons, by humility and suavity when
he was at the height of human greatness, and by cheerful
resignation under cruel wrongs and misfortunes.’
. . . ’He did nothing amiss during his
short administration.’

His fall may be traced to several causes: to
the fact that the puritan party proper, who supported
him, the ‘sober men’ mentioned by Baxter
‘that called his father no better than a traitorous
hypocrite,’ had not power to resist the fanatic
cabal of army chiefs: to the necessity he was
under of protecting some justly-odious confederates
of Oliver: his own want of ability or energy
to govern,—­a point fully recognized during
Oliver’s supremacy; and to his own honourable
decision not to ’have a drop of blood shed on
his poor account.’ Yet there is ample evidence
to show that Richard, had he chosen, might have made
a struggle to retain the throne,—­sufficient,
at least, to have thus deluged the kingdom.

Richard’s life was passed in great quiet after
1660: Charles II, according to Clarendon, with
a wise and humorous lenity, not thinking it ‘necessary
to inquire after a man so long forgotten.’
His letters reveal a man of affectionate and honest
disposition; he uses the Puritan phraseology of the
day without leaving a sense of nausea in the reader’s
mind. At Hursley he was buried at a good old
age in 1712.

F: p. 152

Page 94

A nation’s craven rage; The want of public
spirit in England shown during the war of 1745-6 is
astonishing. ‘England,’ wrote Henry
Fox, ’is for the first comer . . . Had
5,000 [French troops] landed in any part of this island
a week ago, I verily believe the entire conquest of
it would not have cost them a battle.’
And other weighty testimonies might be added, in
support of Lord Mahon’s view as to the great
probability of the Prince’s success, had he
been allowed by his followers to march upon London
from Derby.

This apathy and the panic which followed found their
natural issue in the sanguinary punishment of the
followers of Prince Charles. ’The city
and the generality,’ wrote H. Walpole in August,
1746, ’are very angry that so many rebels have
been pardoned.’ The vindictive cruelty
then shown makes, in truth (if we compare the magnitude
and duration of the rebellion for which punishment
was to be exacted), an unsatisfactory contrast to
the leniency of 1660. But History supplies only
too numerous proofs that a century’s march in
civilisation may be always undone at once by the demons
of Panic or of Party in the hour of their respective
triumphs.

G: p. 169

Ripe to wed with Liberty; Looking at the American
War of Independence without party-passion and distortion,
as should now at least be possible to Englishmen,
the main cause must be acknowledged to lie simply in
the growth and geographical position of the Colonies,
which had brought them to the age of natural liberty,
and had begun to fit them for its exercise:—­facts
which it was equally in accordance with nature that
the Fatherland should fail to perceive. For
the causes which gradually determined American resistance
we must look, (as regards us), not to the blundering
English legislation after 1760,—­to the formalism
of Grenville, the subterfuges of Franklin,—­but
to the whole course of our commercial policy since
the Revolution: As regards the Colonies, to the
extinction of the power of France in America by the
Treaty of Paris in 1763: (Lecky: ch. v;
Mahon: ch. xliii).

The Stamp Act of 1765 brought home, indeed, to a rapidly-developing
people the supremacy claimed across the Atlantic; but
the obnoxious taxation which it imposed, (despite
the splendid sophistry of Chatham), cannot be shown
to differ essentially from the trade restrictions and
monopolies enacted in long series after 1688, as the
result of the predominance obtained at the Revolution
by the commercial classes in this country, and which
so far as 1765 the colonies openly recognized as legal.

Going, however, beyond these minor motives, the true
cause was unquestionably that the time for separate
life, for America to be herself, had come. This
was a crisis which home-legislation could do little
to create or to avert: a natural law, which only
worked itself out ostensibly by political manoeuvres
and military operations, so ill-managed as to be rarely
creditable to either side;—­and, regarded
simply as a ‘struggle for existence,’ is,
in the eye of impartial history, hardly within the
scope of praise or censure.

Page 95

But it was a neutrally tinted background like this,
which could most effectually bring into full relief
the great qualities of the one great man who was prominent
in the conflict.